Drabbles and Assorted Ficlets
by Colubrina
Summary: Assorted drabbles and ficlets with various pairings. These are stand-alone stories that leaked out of my brain and will not be expanded. If you don't like short things, please don't read them.
1. He Hated Her (Tom-Hermione)

She infuriated him, all bushy hair and that hand constantly waving in the air as if she were drowning in the sea and only the professor's attention could save her. She was a know-it-all, a swot, and so socially inept it almost hurt to watch her.

She'd fallen into the past, broken time turner in her hand and confused horror on her face, a third year student placed into a dorm and told to just take classes and everything would get sorted out.

She also had higher marks then him and that meant she had to be either acquired or neutralized. He wasn't particular about which option turned out to be the right choice.

* * *

She hated him. All smug arrogance with that aristocratic smile and the lips that curled in disdain whenever her blood status was mentioned. She could feel him watching her. All the time he studied her as if she were a problem to which he was trying to tease out an answer.

He made her brain itch and her skin crawl and her pulse race and she wished he'd leave her alone.

* * *

He watched her for so long he knew her moods like he knew his own. He looked for her at breakfast. He sat close enough in the library to hear the tuneless humming she did when she read.

He saw she was friendless and lonely and scared and covering all that with crossed arms and defiant glares. He saw she was brilliant and vulnerable.

He saw the smiles she let free when she thought she was alone and she found an idea in a book that excited her. He realized, one afternoon, he'd come to look forward to those smiles. He wanted to see them more often.

He considered killing her. She was a weakness and he didn't have time for weaknesses.

Still, that smile. No need to be hasty.

* * *

She twitched when he sat next to her and shifted subtly away. He pulled the book she had been reading out of her fingers and, over her protests, read the name of the potion she'd been reviewing.

"Felix Felicis," he said, trying not to sound impressed. "That's seventh year work."

She shrugged. "I thought if I made it it would help me figure out how to get back to my right time."

"You don't trust the powers that be?" He asked. He didn't, of course, but most students did. Children were so conditioned to trust adults they didn't stop to question authority. Of course, adults believed children were harmless, a misconception he was happy to exploit.

She snorted rather rudely, however, at his question about trust and his interest in the witch, already too high, increased.

"Why go back?" He asked her. "Why not stay here?"

She looked at him as if he were an idiot. "My friends are there," she said. "My family is there. My life is there."

"Surely you have some friends here," he said. She looked at him and shook her head and he said, "Well, how about me?"

She pointed at him and said, "Slytherin," and then tapped her finger on her chest and said with exaggerated patience, "Muggle-born."

He pointed at her and said, "Hermione." He pointed back at himself and said, "Tom. Since, apparently, we are naming things today."

"Very funny," she said. "I know that you despise me. It doesn't exactly make for a good start to a friendship."

"You shouldn't believe every rumor you hear," Tom said. "You, of all people, should know that people are envious of anyone who shines; they attempt to dim us with their lies."

She smiled. Oh, he thought, that smile. He slid her book back across the table to her and said, "Do you want some help?"

"Do you really want to offer it?" she asked.

"It's good to acquire new skills," Tom said. And people, he thought.

* * *

He infuriated her. All brilliant smiles and those awful friends. But once Tom Riddle had turned his attention on to you it was impossible to resist. It didn't take long for her to stop even trying.

* * *

She charmed him with that smile. He told himself it simply wasn't rational to discard any girl who could make the good luck potion at thirteen.

Even if he had helped.


	2. An Inexplicable Promise (Remus-Hermione)

Happy Birthday, ShayaLonnie

. . . . . . . .

The girl fell – quite literally fell – from the sky, as if she had apparated in and had misjudged her landing. She was covered in blood and absolutely filthy and had a slur cut on her arm that Remus, no stranger to hurled insults, flinched when he saw. Later, Sirius would tell him he had to have been hallucinating. "You never told me that vivid sexual dreams were part of the whole werewolf gig, mate," he would say. "Maybe it's not quite as bad as you've been making it out to be." Much later still, when Remus looked across the classroom and saw a familiar head of hair, he would cringe in recognition. He spent much of that year reminding himself that when he had met her they had both been eighteen, that it was best to pretend it had never happened, that he certainly couldn't think of it when he looked at the fourteen-year-old version of one of the two women he was to love in his life.

She, after all, had only been his for a few hours.

She gasped when she saw him, and spun around, wand in hand as if looking for a battle. When none appeared she turned back to him and he backed away from her self-consciously. He knew he looked bad, dirty and bloodied himself after a night locked in a cabin as a wolf, and he was used to judgment on every face. All she had on hers, though, was concern.

"What happened?" she said, "Who did this to you?" She was, he realized, angry on his behalf. Enraged, even. She was ready to find whoever had hurt him and curse them on the spot. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen someone so high on adrenaline and fear in his life and was quite sure no one had ever brought that kind of raw fury to his defense before.

"It's fine," he stammered out. "Who did this to _you_?"

"Lots of people," she muttered. "Where am I?" She looked around and swore. "The Shrieking Shack. How did I get here. Who _are_ you? And why aren't you up at the castle?"

"I'm Remus," he said, not expecting her to freeze and then turn toward him. Not expecting her to run her eyes over him as if cataloging that no, it couldn't be and yet it was. Not expecting to see horror and relief, equally baffling to him, fighting for dominance on her dirty face.

"You're alive," she whispered and then she was in his arms and this girl he _didn't even know_ was hugging him and crying and offering thanks up to a god Remus knew he didn't believe in that he was alive. She stopped and, afraid someone would see him with this girl and think he'd attacked her, Remus broke every rule of common sense and pulled her into the shack and shut the door.

"I was about to go up to the castle," he offered and she nodded.

"It must have been a full moon last night," she said, her eyes still just looking at him as if he were some kind of gift she'd never expected to receive. "That explains why you're… but when is it? How old are you?" The demand was sharp and harsh.

"I'm in my seventh year," he said.

"Me too," she said, sagging a little, "or I would be if… well, it doesn't matter. Let me heal you. That I'm good at by now, sure enough, and there's no reason for you to – "

"I don't need healing," he said, "I'm used to this. What _happened_ to you?"

"War," she said. "War happened. Is happening. Fuck, will happen. I don't know what bloody tense to use."

She was shaking, he saw, and he reached a hand out to her wanting somehow to comfort this raging woman. "It's not happening now," he said softly and she let him touch her and then hug her and then she was in his arms and starting to sob and he rested his forehead on hers. "What can I do?" he asked.

"Nothing, I don't think," she said. "I'm here. I don't know how or why. Will I stay? Will I get jerked back to my own time? Fuck," she almost screamed the word with frustration. "I'm supposed to be fighting. I'm supposed to be helping."

"Maybe you're supposed to be here," he offered. "Maybe this is a… I don't know... a respite?"

"Time doesn't work that way," she said. "This isn't even possible."

"You're talking to a man who turns into a wolf when the moon is full," Remus said rather dryly. "Possible and impossible are somewhat fluid concepts for me." Somehow that observation made her smile, calmed her down, and she began to just cry and he held onto the mysterious girl while she sobbed and sobbed in his arms. She sobbed as if she'd just seen people she loved die. She sobbed as if she'd been afraid for years and had been holding it together and had finally given up. She sobbed and he patted her and stroked her hair and she slowly calmed down and then he'd pushed that hair out of her face to try to wipe some of her tears away and she hiccupped and swallowed a final sob and looked up at him.

He bent to kiss her, meaning it to be just a brush of his lips across her cheek but she turned at the wrong time (the right time) and his mouth was on hers.

She pulled back and looked at him.

"I'm so sorry," he said right as she said, "This is wrong, I can't –"

"How is it wrong?" he asked. "Is it because I'm a werewolf, because that's –"

"No," she gasped. "It's because you're married."

It was such an incongruous thing to hear he started to laugh. "Married?" he said with bitterness he hadn't even realized he felt. "I'm a monster. I'm lucky to have friends but married? That's never going to happen for me. No woman is ever going to - no."

"Possible and impossible not so fluid after all?" she asked.

"Not that fluid, no," he said. "I'm not lovable. I'll never be lovable."

"You're wrong," she said, "Remus, you're so wrong." She raised a hand to his face and looked at him with such intensity he almost believed her. "We all love you. Will love you. Loved you. Oh _god_ ," she began to cry again. "Remus."

He kissed her again, then, or maybe she kissed him. He was never quite sure. He was never quite sure who started to strip first, though he remembered very clearly fumbling with the laces of his shoes, laces that suddenly seemed recalcitrant and tied more tightly than ever before. When they were done, lying together on the dirty floor of the shack he'd always hated, his hand entwined in her dirty, unforgettable hair, she said, "If I go, if I go back, oh Remus. Promise me something. You have to promise me this even if it makes no sense at all."

"Anything," he said.

"Don't go to the final battle," she said. "Don't go to the battle at Hogwarts. Stay home. Stay home, and make her stay home too. _Promise me_ this."

"I don't understand," he said but she gripped his hand so tightly he was afraid his bones would break and he nodded. "I promise, I won't go. I'll make her – whoever she is – stay home too."

"Remus Lupin," she whispered. "Who would have thought. Thank you."

And she faded away and he was left staring at the place she'd been and feeling the hole in his heart where she'd stood for a few hours, fierce and scared and ready to do battle on his behalf. Begging him to make her an inexplicable promise.

She'd never even told him her name.

Much, much later he refused to go to Hogwarts. Fought with Tonks until they were screaming at one another. Found Hermione Granger after it was all over, found the girl he'd known for a few hours and then seen as a child, and as a young woman who didn't know, and saw in her eyes that she knew.

That it had just happened for her.

"Thank you," he said.

"You lived," she whispered and he wrapped his arms around the filthy and blood-stained girl he'd known and knew once more. "You lived," she said again.


	3. Pansy Character Sketch

Pansy hates them.

She hates their perfect blond hair and their way with clothes and their sly smiles that always mean something other than what they seem. Boys. Boys she gets. Boys she understands. Draco rolls his eyes at her and tells her she's an idiot, that they're best friends, but she sees the way his eyes follow Astoria Greengrass.

Astoria knows the rules. She was born knowing the rules. She looks down and up and makes this weird little smile that Pansy's tried to mimic in the mirror and can't. Astoria makes that smile and teachers give her extra time and boys gaze at her with their stupid soppy eyes and Pansy, Pansy who climbed trees with them and Pansy who threw rocks at the water and could skip a rock further and harder than even Vince, Pansy's suddenly forgotten.

When she's older, when she has the words and the context, when she's survived a war to become not just the girl-who's-only-friends-with-boys but the girl-who-tried-to-give-over-Harry-Potter, when people _really_ hate her, then she'll talk about patriarchy and oppression and don't you people see how media just portrays women as bitches, but right now she's a sixteen-year-old girl and she's watching her best friends watch the girls who can do it, can do that thing she can't even name.

Can coquette.

Is coquette even a verb?

She can do math and she can write and she can throw and she can be meaner than any snake you've ever seen but she can't girl. Her nails chip because she forgets the drying charm. High heels hurt too much. She's taken to counting how many boys she's grown up with talk to her about girls as if they don't even remember she is one and it's not like she even _wants_ Greg Goyle to fawn over her the way he does over that girl in Hufflepuff with the tight jumper and the simper.

She just wants to be seen.

She's not brave and she's not strong and she'll never ever be a hero but she's the one who strokes Draco's hair when he's shaking because he's afraid. She's the one he trusts with his secrets and she holds onto them and promises never to tell and she just watches him watch Astoria Greengrass like her downward glances and long lashes are his salvation.

She wishes she knew how to girl even as she wraps herself in a mantle of not caring. She wishes it didn't matter. She slices at the heroes with words and glances and sneers and holds herself so tightly she's going to shatter and she learns that if you dig your nails into your palms the pain can help you keep a smile on your face, can keep you from screaming.

She'll never be anyone's salvation. She'll take Greg out for a beer when the third girl in a row has decided she can't really handle a boyfriend whose father's in Azkaban and she'll tell him there are more fish in the sea and she'll be Astoria's bridesmaid 'because you've always been Draco's best friend' and she'll smile and she'll smile and she'll smile and she'll go home to her flat and the one plant she's able to keep alive.

She doesn't care.

She doesn't.


	4. Riding Lessons (Marcus-Hermione)

**Happy Belated Birthday, nostalgiakills**

* * *

When Hermione Granger walked through the door Marcus Flint barely recognized her. The bushy hair that had been her defining feature at school was pulled up into a brutal twist. Of coarse, he had been several years ahead of her and wouldn't have expected to have recognized her at all if it hadn't been for all the press coverage after the war. The golden girl, the articles claimed. Harry Potter's best friend! Responsible for Voldemort's downfall! The stories made it sound as though she had single-handedly throttled the man with a strand of that hair. The only thing that had kept him from despising her was that she seemed, at least if the attitude he gleaned from the articles could be believed, to have found all of the hoopla off-putting. Now she was dragging a small girl by the hand. The girl had a shock of curly red hair and sullen brown eyes. "I understand that you offer flying lessons in addition to selling brooms," Hermione said with no introduction.

"I do," he said. "Though, to be honest, most parents are happy to take care of that part at home."

"I hate riding a broom," she said.

"Wouldn't the girl's father want to take her flying?" he asked. He wasn't sure why he was trying to drive this customer away. Usually he would have the kid on the most expensive broom he could soak them for and signed up for a 10-week course the moment a well-groomed mother inquired about flying lessons.

"Her father and I are separated," Hermione Granger said. Her face did not invite him to ask any questions about that.

"He's a rat bastard," the little girl piped up.

Hermione Granger looked uncomfortable, and she smiled the grim smile of a parent who was wishing her child had not just said that. "Your father is a good man and loves you very much," she said. "We just stopped loving one another."

"That's not what you told Aunt Ginny," the little girl said. "You said he was a cheating prick and that you hoped –"

"Rose," Hermione said, her voice a clear warning. The girl stop talking. "Do you have children, Mr. Flint?" She asked. When he shook his head she said thorugh a tight smile, "Then you are unfamiliar with their uncanny way of remembering a conversation they overheard and repeating it for two years straight while simultaneously forgetting being asked to clean up their room." She sighed. "At any rate, Ronald is too busy with his new baby to teach Rose how to fly and I certainly am not capable of doing it."

"Well, let's get her signed up for flying lessons, " Marcus Flint said.

By the fifth lesson Marcus still hadn't quite figured this woman out. Most parents dropped their children off and then left for coffee or, at the very least, sat down and pulled out books to read. Not this one. She watched her daughter the entire lesson. She paid attention. He began to wonder what it would be like to have that kind of attention focused on him. He began to wonder what kind of man had been stupid enough to let that kind of attention go.

"What do you do, Hermione, when you aren't standing at the pitch watching your daughter learn to fly?" He asked during that fifth lesson.

"Magical Law Enforcement," she said, her eyes still on her daughter.

"A lawyer," he said feeling a bit disappointed that she was out of his league. He had failed his N.E.W.T. exams first once and then again and then had begun offering flying lessons. He hadn't had a glorious Quidditch career. He didn't make a lot of money. He was not the sort of man any woman who had become a lawyer would be interested in.

"I thought, going into it," she was saying, "that being a solicitor would be all about helping the less fortunate. Turns out it's mostly about helping one company take slightly more advantage of another company." She turned and looked at him then, the first time he could remember her having looked at anything other than Rose during a lesson. "Your job is honest," she said. "I envy you that."

"Not many people envy a man who spends his days selling brooms and teaching other people's children how to fly," he said looking away from her and studying Rose, who was repeating a feint drill with frightening determination. "She's very athletic," he added.

"She gets that from her father," Hermione said, and turned back to watch her daughter fly toward the ground and then pull back up.

Marcus noted the girl was getting progressively more daring with how close she got before pulling up and thought with somewhat soppy nostalgia that this one would have a great time at school, would surely make the team her first year. "Hermione," he asked, before his nerves failed, "would you be interested in going out for coffee sometime?"

"After a lesson?" She asked, her nose squinched in a way that made him wild to kiss her.

"I was thinking without your daughter," he said, adding in a rush, "not that Rose isn't a great kid, I just. -"

"That would be nice," Hermione said, her voice almost as rushed as his. "She's at her dad's every other weekend. Maybe this Saturday? I mean, unless you have plans. I shouldn't assume you don't have weekend plans," she said, stumbling over the words and biting her lip as she kept her eyes on Rose.

"I don't," he said. "Coffee with you, that's all."

Coffee led to a walk. A walk led to dinner. Dinner led to more coffee, this time at his flat. Marcus wasn't quite sure what happened that made that round of coffee lead into him suggesting she seemed tense and would she like a back rub. Optimism, he supposed.

She suggested, a few minutes into letting him knead his fingers into the flesh of her shoulders, that maybe she should take her shirt off "to make the back rub easier."

She was wearing a black lace bra and, seeing that, Marcus began to think that his optimism - optimism which had also led to changing his sheets that morning just because, as he told himself, civilized people did that on a regular basis - might not be wholly misplaced.

Her knickers matched.

Afterward he began pulling pins out of her mussed twist. "Merlin, woman," he said. "Let your hair down."

She reached her hand up to touch her hair self-consciously, an almost incomprehensible gesture in a woman who'd been gasping his name minutes earlier as she shuddered into climax under him. Later he'd realize that all the years of torment in school had left her permanently insecure about her hair. He'd learn that her ex-husband had been happy to exploit that insecurity when they'd been in the stage of their breakup where they'd said the cruelest things possible to one another. Now he just grabbed her hand and brought it to his mouth. "It's beautiful," he said. "You're beautiful."

She shook her head and he rolled his eyes. "Beautiful," he said again, "but a bit of a liar."

She looked offended and he grinned. "You told me, when we first met, that you didn't like riding brooms and that appears to have been not true at all."

"This wasn't what I meant," Hermione said, batting at his hand. "And the first time we met you probably called me some kind of horrid name."

Marcus was lying next to her on the sheets - sheets that really needed changing again at this point - propped up on one elbow and using his other hand to keep spreading her hair out along the pillow. "Kids can be right shites," he agreed. "Fortunately we aren't twelve anymore."

She reached a hand out to touch his face, running her fingers along his jaw. "Really?" she asked.

"I'm really not twelve," he said. "Not even on the right side of thirty, love."

"That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.

Marcus sighed. "I grew up, Hermione. We all grew up. Even little princelings like Nott and Malfoy don't go around spouting off blood purity rhetoric anymore. We've all got jobs and rent to pay and we spend our time trying to remember if there's anything in our flats to eat."

"Malfoy has a job?" Hermione looked doubtful.

"Well, maybe not him," Marcus admitted. "But I do. You do. Hell, you've even got an ex-husband. We've got real things to deal with now, not that bullshite."

"The war was pretty real," she said, rubbing at her arm.

He leaned over and kissed the 'mudblood' scar that neither of them had openly acknowledged before this. "That wasn't what I meant," he said softly. "Just that... if you can forgive any arrogant, hateful tripe I might have spewed at you when I was a kid I'd be grateful. My only defense is that I didn't know how serious it was."

She leaned toward him so she could rest her cheek against his bare chest. "We should have all just been throwing childish taunts at each other. They shouldn't have ever been," she paused and he leaned over to brush his lips over her forehead. "They shouldn't have ever turned into war. Not like they did."

Marcus wasn't quite sure what she meant but that she was here was, he assumed, a pretty good indication that she'd forgiven him.

"Did you know Malfoy has a kid the same age as Rose?" he asked. "They'll be in the same class at Hogwarts."

She smothered a laugh. "Is it wrong that I hope this kid and Rose become best friends just because I know that would make Ron mental?"

"Not wrong," Marcus said, "though that mean streak does make me wonder if maybe you aren't quite the noble and good-hearted Gryffindor people assume." He smiled as he looked at her, hair down and sweat still drying on her skin. "You've got a bit of a vengeful streak, Miss Hermione Granger. Weasley. Granger."

Hermione laughed. "Granger again, and you have no idea, Marcus Flint. You don't make a good lawyer if you aren't willing to go for the jugular every time and I am very, very good at what I do." She bit her lip and looked at him. "Some day maybe I'll tell you some of the things we got up to - I got up to - while your lot was wasting time singing absurd fight songs about Quidditch."

"I'd like that," he said, hearing the implied promise this wasn't a one-time thing.

"I should tell Rose to stay away from the Malfoy boy," Hermione said, amused mischief in her voice. "That'll ensure she'll seek him out."

Marcus groaned through an admiring laugh. "You are definitely not the good girl I would have assumed."

She pulled herself up and straddled his thighs and he hissed in his breath. "We aren't kids anymore," she agreed. "But, unless I am very much mistaken, you might not be averse to a second go-round."

Marcus reached a hand up to trace the curve of her breast. "I could be convinced," he said. "Persuaded."

She slipped down his legs until she was sprawled out, half on him and half on the bed, her hair covering her face as she lowered her head to his hip. "I have to admit, Marcus Flint," she said, "that the way you've kept in shape with all the flying is most appealing." He was going to ask if her ex had let himself go when she ran a tongue along his skin and almost all thoughts except ones about this witch fled his brain.

"Hermione," he groaned as she continued to tease him, her mouth tracing the lines of his muscles and hips.

"You wanted something?" she asked.

He managed to keep from grabbing her by all that hair and shoving her mouth where he wanted it, albeit barely. He thought his patience would be rewarded when she moved her mouth lower and he could feel her hot breath on his cock - a cock that had sprung back to attention as if he were that teenage boy again - but she moved lower yet and began kissing the inside of his thigh.

"You're trying to kill me," he said. "Why?"

She laughed and it was one of the most beautiful sounds he'd ever heard. It had been so long. Women weren't interested in their kid's flying teacher, they weren't, but this one seemed to be. This wonderful, brilliant, shockingly vicious one seemed to be and he wasn't going to question it.

He did later. "Why me?" he'd ask her. "You could have had anyone. Why a washed up Quidditch player who never made it big?"

She'd hit him in the arm when he asked that. "Don't put yourself down like that," she'd say. "And not many men are interested in a divorcee with kids and a time sucking career."

"Your kids are great," he'd say, confused. "And do people actually object to how incredibly brilliant and successful you are?"

She'd look at him at that and he'd remember her ex, a man who'd been more than threatened by her career. Not, of course, that he refused to cash the alimony cheques.

That conversation, though, occurred in the future, after they'd admitted to Rose and Hugo they were seeing one another, after Rose had sulked for three weeks and finally manipulated Marcus into giving her a broom she should have been much too young to be able to control, after Ron Weasley confronted his ex-wife in public for 'screwing a worthless Slytherin'.

"Grow up," she would tell him. "The rest of us have."

Now, however, Marcus Flint just lay in his bed and thanked whatever gods had decided to take mercy on him and entice this woman to meet him for coffee even if she did seem to intend to kill him in pieces, her mouth on his thigh and her fingers tangled in his wiry curls and only the light tease of her hair brushing against his cock. "Hermione," he said again, his voice nearly begging her.

"Oh?" she said, "you wanted this maybe?" and she ran her tongue around just the tip of him and right as he was about to decide that she really was utterly, completely and unforgivably diabolical she took his whole cock into her mouth and began running her lips up and down his shaft. He kept his hands fisted in the rumbled sheet so he wouldn't grab at her until she pulled her head away and said, "You can, you know."

He lifted his hands tentatively to her hair and when she just smiled at him from under her lashes before taking him into her mouth again he tightened his grip and pulled her head toward him. She somehow managed to keep her tongue doing something that pushed him even faster towards his second climax of the night even as he was thrusting into her. He could feel the back of her throat and could feel she was wet and hot and sucking so damn hard he was going to die.

She really was trying to kill him.

Still, it was a good way to go.

When he came into her she gently lifted her head off him and swallowed, wiping a trail of semen off her lips with the back of her hand. "Fuck, woman," he said, breathing the words out. "You are amazing."

"Well," she said with a grin. "As you pointed out, we aren't kids anymore."

"Thank Merlin for that," Marcus said, pulling her back up to cuddle against him. "Thank Merlin some things just get better as you get older. Give me a few minutes to recover from being turned into a puddle of goo by the impressive witch lying here and I'll return the favor."

"I think I want a nap first," Hermione admitted. "Maybe in the morning?"

"Deal," he said as he wrapped both arms around her. "Maybe then we can also talk a little bit more about how you think you don't like riding brooms."

"Maybe," Hermione said around a yawn, "I've just never had the right one before. Maybe I just needed an upgrade from the one I got in school."

Marcus smothered a snort.

He had to admit he really liked that vicious streak.


	5. It's Always Been You (Harry-Hermione)

"Well," Harry said, looking at the space where Ron had been, "I guess that's that."

"Bastard," Hermione muttered and sank down onto her cot.

"I never expected him to –"

"I did," Hermione said, cutting Harry off. "I was surprised he came with us in the first place and I've been expecting him to run from the beginning." Harry looked stunned by her bitter revelation and Hermione sighed. This trek through the woods to find and destroy mysterious objects housing parts of the shattered soul of a madman had worn away any patina of civilized pretense she'd ever had. "Ron's always been volatile," she explained. "He reacts to emotions, not sense." She ran a hand through her dirty hair. "That's great if he's standing up for a friend, not so great if he feels put upon. This ongoing misery with no clear end, well, it was inevitable he'd feel like he wasn't being treated well and get resentful."

"None of us are being treated well," Harry objected, looking around their dirty tent. "You think I like this?"

"No," Hermione said softly. "I just think you stick with things no matter now unpleasant they are."

"So do you," Harry said, sitting down beside her.

She shrugged. "Well, it's not like I have anywhere to go. I think I can put off my pressing appointment with you-know-who's merry band for a bit to stick around and help out."

Harry laughed and she huffed out a tired grin and turned her head to look at him. He had his head down in his hands and was as dirty and tired as she was. "I'm scared," Harry admitted.

"Me too," she said. "I keep expecting it to get better and it never does."

"What if we die?" Harry asked her.

Hermione wanted to be able to tell him that of course they wouldn't die, that they'd find what they were looking for, that they'd get answers, that they'd save the day and kill the monster. She just didn't believe it herself anymore. "Then I guess we die," she said.

"When we get out of here," Harry said, "I think you should reconsider that career as a therapist."

Hermione laughed out loud at that, the sound shocking in the dim, cold tent. "Doesn't seem like it's worth it to lie anymore. We're probably going to fail. We're probably going to die. That death is probably going to be unpleasant."

"Therapist definitely a bad career option," Harry said. "Maybe not a primary teacher either."

She laughed again. "You're a wonder, Harry Potter," she said. "Chasing away despair even when it's this bad."

"I've always been a problem child," he agreed.

"Don't know when to quit," she said.

"Or when something's a bad idea," he said as he laced his fingers through hers. "You've always been there, Hermione. Since that first day on the train. You're the only person who's always believed in me. Whether it was that I'm a parselmouth or that stupid tri-wizard tournament or this, you've just never decided it's too much."

She ducked her head and looked away, though she left her hand in his. "What are friends for?" she asked.

"Apparently they're for storming out of the woods because it got too rough," Harry said.

Hermione sighed. "He'll be back. Eventually, I'm sure. He always calms down eventually."

Harry tugged on her hand and when she turned to look at him he had one hand out, ready to lay it across her cheek. She froze at the touch. "Harry?" she said, the word a question.

He was looking at her with wonder, as if he were realizing something for the first time. "It really has always been you," he said. "For years, and I was too stupid to see it. You're right, it's not worth it to lie anymore"

"I – " she began but he cut her off when he leaned in toward her and pressed his lips to hers, tentatively at first and then with greater assurance when she didn't pull away. He let go of her hand to cup her face with both of his palms and she nervously parted her lips a little to let his tongue dart into her mouth.

After a minute he drew back and pulled his hands away from her. "This is a bad idea?" he said, but the words were clearly a question.

"Do you think it is?" she asked, her own hands clenched in her lap, twisting in and out of one another.

"Maybe?" he said, the tone a question again.

She nodded and was about to turn away when he added, "But I'd like to try anyway."

Ron blamed himself for years, a blame that culminated in what was supposed to be a toast at their wedding but that turned into drunken recrimination about how if he'd never left them alone in that tent Harry and Hermione would never have gotten together.

It was an uncomfortable moment for everyone. No one mentioned it ever again, though Hermione was overheard to whisper to Harry, somewhat maliciously, "I did tell you he'd come back eventually."


	6. What You Think Best (Lucius-Narcissa)

When her mother sat her down to tell her they'd arranged her marriage Narcissa Black could tell Druella was tense. After Andromeda's disgraceful exit into the arms of a man whose name no one would say Druella Black probably feared this daughter would be rebellious as well. And she might have, might have done more than cast her eyes down at the polished walnut floor and murmur polite acceptance of her parents' choice, if her brittle mother had offered up anyone other than Lucius Malfoy.

Lucius Malfoy.

Blond, aristocratic, so cold you feared your hand would burn if you touched him, Lucius Malfoy, who had kissed her fingers at the Yule Ball and told her she was beautiful. She'd been prepared to ignore him, would have brushed it off as one of the endlessly insincere compliments men gave the Black sisters, if she hadn't happened to glance up at his face. He'd meant it, or, rather, he'd used the conventionally polite and empty phrase to mean so much more.

Her mother cared about prestige. Druella cared how people saw her. She cared about being successful by the rules of her own world and, in truth, she wasn't. Not really. Three girls and no heir and she was a failure as a pureblood wife. People whispered it was shocking Cygnus hadn't set her aside. That had driven her into polishing the children she had until they were afraid to be anything other than perfection. Narcissa had never doubted her mother only loved her because she seemed to be a flawless extension of the woman's own desires. Andromeda had been an excellent lesson in what happened to Black girls who developed flaws and it wasn't motherly love; it was a scorch mark on the family tapestry.

Lucius, though, he'd brushed a finger over the scar on her forehead, the one she'd gotten when she'd fallen off her horse and her head had met a rock, and murmured it only made her more beautiful. Lucius, with whom who she'd been going on wholly appropriate and quiet walks to the lake, Lucius who'd coaxed her into sharing details of her home life and who'd said after a bit, his voice tight, "Well, we'll marry young, won't we."

She'd turned, shocked, and he'd kissed her for the first time, his lips light across her cheek. "People should take care of their family. People should value their family above anything else."

She'd smiled at him then, and he'd smiled back at how feral her expression seemed. "I knew you had a core of tempered steel," he whispered. "I knew you were the strongest witch I'd ever met.

So now, as she sat in their light-filled front parlour and Druella Black told her her future, she almost permitted herself one of those wild smiles. She would have if her mother might not have interpreted such as cheek or immodesty and slapped her for it. "Whatever you and daddy think is best," she said.

Druella patted her on the cheek, pleased. "Such a good girl," she said. "So biddable."

And Narcissa Black bowed her head and allowed her mother to think whatever she liked while she vowed that no child of hers would ever fear that love was conditional. I'd walk into hell for my child, she thought to herself, I'd defend her against anyone or anything.


	7. Mary Sue (Hermione)

Hermione was perfect.

That's the thing you need to understand. She was intelligent, clever, brave, fearless, and that she didn't fuss with her hair was a deliberate statement about the shallow beauty norms that constrain women (and she still looked better than all the other girls at school). She was also the most powerful witch ever. Like, ever.

You think Voldemort was strong? Piffle. Dumblemore? A child next to her.

Well, technically she was the child but he was LIKE a child compared to her because of her vast intellect.

Even the archaic and obtuse classification system the Hogwarts Library used bowed to her obvious superiority and just gave up its books without a fight.

She never ever made a mistake or had poor judgment or did something that might have not been the best choice ever. She never allowed herself to be manipulated by a more experienced or crueler character and never faltered in her confident stride. Because she was perfect. She also had a great wardrobe and everyone liked her. One smile that showed her perfect teeth and even the darkest Dark Lord turned into a puppy at her feet, rolling on his back and begging for a belly scratch. Schoolyard bullies were no match for her wit and would-be mean girls just ended up asking for her help with math.

Also, she had the correct sized bra and all her under things were in matching sets. Do you have any idea how rare that is?

If you're waiting for conflict or an interesting story you'll be waiting a long time because our heroine is perfect and everything goes her way and she solves all problems with a snap of her manicured fingers.

She never chipped a nail either. Did I mention that?

… … … …

 _ **When the writer starts to get punchy…**_


	8. Snow White

She kept her heart in a box. She hadn't meant to do it that way. There were so many other ways to make a horcrux, of course, but this worked.

And he had cut it out of her. It seemed a little silly to let all that suffering go to waste.

You can't be queen, he'd said, knife in his hand. You can't be the Chosen One. The Dark Lady sent me to stop you before you kill her.

Harriet had tilted her head to the side and watched as the pale hunter had held her down and cut into her, had taken things from her that she might have offered up willingly if he'd only asked.

He took the heart back. She knew that because when she walked into the woods to meet with the Wicked Witch she had it with her in a box.

The girl who lived, come to die, the woman said.

I find not having a heart to be convenient, Harriet said. I don't feel anymore. Also, you can't kill me now.

The pale one, white as snow, watched her, his grey eyes afraid.

Surely you knew that in fairy tales the queen always dies, she said to him. She's always supplanted by the step-daughter.

She held her hand out for the box, ornate, carved, holding her heart. When she lifted the lid she saw the heart was still beating and she considered it.

No, she said. It's easier this way, and she shut the lid again.

She gestured to the hunter to follow her and he did for the whole, long walk to the castle.


	9. Severus Snape

Severus Snape sat at his desk in his dorm room and wrote out the ingredients list of the week's potions assignments in alphabetical order. His hand was neat and tiny and tight and there wasn't a wobble to be found. Antimony. Bat Blood. Cinnamon.

You'd never know he was restraining himself with the kind of ruthless self-control that only growing up with an alcoholic who liked to hit could instill.

"If you tell anyone," Headmaster Dumbledore had said, "You'll be expelled. This was just a prank gone wrong and it's more important to protect the privacy of a student with a debilitating condition, one that people are prejudiced against, than for you to get any kind of revenge."

"Revenge?" Severus had said, sitting in the man's office. He'd still been shaking at that point. "A prank? Black tried to kill me." He'd heard his voice go up into near hysterics and had struggled to get it back down. "He would have, to, if he hadn't been stopped."

"A prank," Dumbledore had said. "I assume you want to stay here at Hogwarts."

"You'd expel _me_?" Severus had had to repeat the threat. Even Dumbledore, he thought, even this man who blatantly favored the Gryffindors and their golden, trouble-making bullies, wouldn't threaten to expel the victim of a would-be murder and protect the perpetrator.

"Yes," Dumbledore had said. "It is imperative that young Mr. Lupin's condition remain private."

"So expel _Black_ ," he'd said. "He tried to kill me." The last sentence was almost forlorn. Severus knew no one was going to defend him. No one ever had except, briefly, Lily. Lily, who he saw more and more with the gang who'd decided he was their favorite victim. Smart. Poor. Socially ill-at-ease. He was an easy target, especially since there were four of them to his one.

"No, I think not," Dumbledore had said, "Not for a prank. Though, you can be confident he will get some detentions to serve."

"May I go?" Severus had asked.

Now he sat in his room, quill moving steadily over his parchment. The poor boy. The easy target. The half-blood in a House filled with confident aristocrats. Nowhere to go. No one to trust.

Now that the Mauraders, as they liked to style themselves, knew they could get away with attempted murder what would they do to him next.

Fluxweed. Leech. Peacock feathers.

Peacock feathers.

He glanced up at the door as he had a thought.

Maybe it was time to talk to Lucius Malfoy, tell him he was interested in Malfoy's little club after all. If he couldn't trust Dumbledore to protect him from classmates bent on murder maybe it was time to look elsewhere.


	10. At the Thames (Theo-Hermione-Draco)

**Happy Birthday, JenCala28!**

. . . . . . . . . .

It started in the library in fifth year on that horrible day the whole school found out Theo's father was a Death Eater.

Hell, he himself hadn't even been sure of that but nothing quite like having your father arrested, in full mask and robes, while trying to kill a bunch of your classmates at the Ministry of Magic, to clarify that point.

It clarified it right into common gossip. He joined Greg and Vince and Draco and the four of them scowled at their schoolmates and looked as intimidating as they could and everyone outside Slytherin stayed away from them. "It doesn't matter," he told Greg. "Fuckers, all of them. We'll be fine. _Fine_."

He wasn't positive whether he was calling their fathers – men stupid enough to have joined up with a Dark Wizard – or their classmates fuckers. All he was quite sure of was that there was no way in hell this was going to be fine. He was bent over a table, trying to put his own mask back in place as firmly as he could before going out to walk in the halls and ignore the pointing and sneering when he felt a light touch on his shoulder.

When he spun around she was there.

"Don't you touch me you filthy –" He cut himself off at the look in her eyes. Hurt. She looked hurt, as if he'd slapped her. "Don't touch me," he said again, lamely.

"I just wanted to say I was sorry," she said, her voice pitched so it wouldn't carry in the library. "I'm sure today's been awful and, well, I'm sorry."

Theo stared at the girl. Mudblood. Filth. And the only person outside his House who'd even spoken to him all day.

"Yeah," he muttered. "Thanks."

"No problem," she said, hefting a ratty bag to her shoulder. "I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of some of those looks."

He'd flushed at that. "Yeah," he said again, then, "Sorry."

She shrugged. "It'll be okay."

"Probably not," he said. "But thanks for saying it."

"What'd she want," Draco Malfoy asked after she walked away.

Theo looked at the back of the retreating Hermione Granger. Her bushy hair had been tied up into a ponytail that was threatening to burst free at any moment, one sock had slipped down and she reached down to hitch it up as she walked. Her eyes, he thought. They had flecks of gold in them. "She wanted to say she was sorry," he said at last to Draco.

"Really?" Draco said in the cold, tight voice he'd been using all day. "Granger wanted that?"

"It's what she said," Theo replied, his eyes still tracking her as she turned a corner and disappeared. Draco leaned into him as if they could draw strength from one another but Theo wasn't sure he had any strength left to give, not even to Draco who needed it so badly.

He tried to put Granger out of his mind after that. However pretty her eyes were, however much she'd made his throat clench with her careful words, she was still anathema. Dirt.

Pretty dirt, though.

He found himself watching her all sixth year. Her hair had a bunch of different shades of brown in it and her skin almost glowed with some kind of inner luminescence he wouldn't have expected in anyone not as painfully pale as Draco. Draco who, he realized, watched her too. Draco, who sat so he could see the Gryffindor table at every meal. Draco, who positioned himself so she was in his line of sight in every class they shared. Draco, whose father was also a Death Eater.

Draco, who was a Death Eater.

Draco, who was his.

"She's pretty," Theo said as he slid next to Draco in Potions one day, his voice neutral.

"Mudblood," Draco said.

"Mmm," Theo said. "So you wouldn't mind if I…" He trailed off at Draco's angry look.

"She's not for the likes of either of us," Draco said, his hands never faltering as he cut tubers into perfect slices. "She's mad for Weasley."

Theo had noticed that.

"What if she weren't?" he asked.

The look Draco gave him was anguished. "I'm a death sentence," he whispered. "For anyone, really, even you, but especially her."

Theo looked down at his own hands. "I would share," he said. "If she'd have us."

Draco swallowed and let a single finger reach out to touch Theo's palm. "After the war," he said. "If I'm alive."

Theo moved his hand to cover Draco's finger. "Best friends and more?" he asked.

Draco just nodded and pulled his hand away.

By the time the war was over, by the time they'd survived and become despised outcasts, free to not be hired for any position, free to be refused service, free to live in a flat and stare at the walls, unsure of what to do with their lives, Theo had almost managed to forget the war heroine who'd put her hand on his arm the day the world had gotten dark and tried to tell him it would be okay, that she was sorry he was hurting. He held onto Draco when he woke screaming and they began a quest to find a way to watch Quidditch when no pub would let Draco in and Theo would be damned if he'd leave the man at home alone and they spent a lot of time walking outdoors, as if they could breath in clean out and breathe out the pollution that choked their souls.

The war had been over for several years when they saw her, throwing rocks into the Thames. "You shouldn't do that," Theo said walking up to stand at her side. "I think there's a sign down the way telling people not to throw things."

"Bugger off," she muttered before she looked at him and blinked a few times. "Theodore Nott?" she asked, as if she were trying to place him.

He nodded.

She looked past him at Draco and said, her tone even more guarded, "Malfoy."

"Granger," he said. "Or is it Weasley now?"

She looked back at the water. "Hermione will do. Certainly not Weasley."

Draco opened his mouth like he was going to say something and Theo stepped on his foot. "How have you been," he asked as Draco glared at him. "Since school, I mean."

She shrugged. "Work, mostly," she said.

"Saving the world still?" Theo asked.

She made a snort that sounded suspiciously like a sob she was trying to hide. "No," she said. "Just filling out reports it seems. Nothing really valuable."

Theo reached out and put one hand on her arm and she flinched at the contact. "I'm sure it's valuable," he said. "Stonehenge wasn't built in a day and all that. What are you doing?"

"Magical creatures department," she said. "The regulation and control thereof."

"That sounds boring as fuck," Draco said, "but valuable enough. Someone's got to do it. Better you than me, though."

"Salazar," Theo snapped at his partner, "Would it be possible for you to be any more tactless?"

Before he could apologize for the man, however, Hermione turned back to them and smiled. "Well, since my ex called it 'a totally worthless waste of my time' I can say with some confidence that, yes, it's possible to be more tactless than Malfoy."

"Draco," he muttered.

"What?" Hermione asked.

"Dray-co," Draco said again, exaggerating the pronunciation. "I mean, if we're to call you by your first name you should return the favor. Draco. Theodore."

She turned her back to the river and leaned up against the railing as she regarded them both. "Theodore," she repeated. "Draco." Then she shook her head. "That feels weird," she admitted. "I even thought of you as Malfoy for years. It's like you have a whole new name."

"New names to try again?" Theo suggested. "We weren't exactly friends in school."

"And you want to be friends now?" Hermione shook her head. "I don't know. Theodore. Mal… Draco. I was tortured in your house, Draco. You stood there while I was – "

She stopped talking and stared at Draco and Theo closed his eyes for a brief moment. Watching Hermione Granger be tortured was a recurring theme in Draco's nightmares along with giant snakes and that cursed Vanishing Cabinet. He opened his eyes again and turned his back on the woman next to him to grab Draco by the arms and start the repeated reassurances that could usually stop the panic attacks. "It's okay, it's over. She survived," Theo said. "You did what you could and you were a kid and it's over. Your aunt is dead. Granger survived. I love you, it's okay." He went through that litany over and over until Draco wasn't shaking any more and had stopped gasping like a man who could barely get enough air.

When Theo turned back to look at her Granger was as pale as he'd ever seen her, almost grey. "He really is sorry about that," Theo said, his voice tight. "It haunts him, actually."

"I'm not going to apologize for being upset I was tortured," Hermione said but she sounded, and looked, shocked by the Draco's response.

"He didn't do it," Theo said, his voice growing in volume. "He would have stopped it if he could. Merlin, he'd been half in love with you for years at that point and you think he wanted to stand there helplessly and watch you be hurt?" He gave her a look of disgust. "It would have been terrible no matter who it was, but that it was you made it so much worse."

"Not as bad as it was for me," she whispered and then Theo realized he'd been almost yelling at a torture victim.

"Shite," he said, and yanked her into a hug without thinking. She stood, stiff, in his arms. "I'm sorry. I'm an arse. Of course it was worse for you."

She pulled herself away and used the edge of her sleeve to wipe at her eyes. "Could this day get any more uncomfortable?" she muttered. "Ron dumps me, or I dump him, hard to be really sure, and then I push Malfoy into a bloody panic attack and now I'm crying all over bloody gorgeous Theodore Nott. What next?"

Theo looked at her for a moment and tried to register that she had opinions about his appearance, that the girl he'd stared at for a year thought he was gorgeous, and then he said, "Dinner?"

She blinked at him a few times and made an undignified sniffle and he muttered, "Not that any place will serve us, of course, the whole Death Eater thing, but we'd be happy to have you over and cook something. I'm a good cook and Draco has managed to accumulate a pretty impressive wine collection."

"No place will serve you?" she asked, her voice taking on an edge that Theo would learn to dread over the next year.

"Death Eater," Draco said, managing to get a certain contemptuous drawl into his own voice despite still holding on to the railing with a white knuckled grip to steady himself. "People have problems with that. Not sure why."

Hermione Granger glared at him, or at least in his general direction, and Draco glared back as she ground out, "Dinner would be lovely, Theodore. And tomorrow night we'll just see about places not serving you."

It started, Theo thought later, in the library at Hogwarts, but it didn't really begin until the Thames.


	11. Let Me Tell You Something True (False)

Fairytales are lies wrapped up in truth and tied with the bow of a metaphor. Or maybe they're just true. Or were, once.

We sit around our campfires and tell the stories we've heard, changing a little bit here and a detail there, until what was once true has become false. We domesticate our saints and our villains and our wild women until they are digestible pap. We bowdlerize.

In some versions, you know, he ties her to the bed so she can't escape. In some, she is the one who seduces him. But always, always the wolf devours Little Red. He consumes her; she becomes a part of him. Or, perhaps, he becomes her.

They do say that you are what you eat.

It was a warning once. There are wolves. There are serpents. Stay at home, little girl. Card the wool and feed the chickens. Stay out of the dark. Don't become the other.

Even if a woodsman should come along and cut the body of the wolf open and help her out into the light again, the little girl can never be unchanged by the experience of being consumed, of becoming the wolf. She will remember the darkness. She may, if she is very unlucky (very lucky), come to crave it.

The woodsman may want to domesticate the girl. It's the way of girls in stories, after all. There are narrative conventions to obey. Be saved. Marry the prince. Live happily ever after. There are conventions. There are _rules._

Once upon a time there was a little girl with a red cloak of hair who was eaten by a wolf. A good man saved her and so she lived happily ever after.

Where's the lie?

Once upon a time there was a little girl with a cloak of red hair who was eaten by a wolf and liked it.

Once upon a time there was a wolf who was eaten by a little girl with a cloak of red hair and liked it.

Once upon a time the little girl cut open the body of the woodsman that she'd married because that's what good girls in stories do and the wolf stepped out.

And they lived happily ever after.

Where's the lie?


	12. You Can Fly (Tom-Ginny)

**A/N - A present for Ibuzoo... contains potentially triggering material.**

 **. . . . . . . . . .**

He's always behind her in mirrors, blood on his mouth and a cigarette in his hands. Always. When she asks why he shrugs and says, "This is in your head, Ginevra. You tell me."

But it's not. Or she thinks it's not. He's there, really there, and she'll spin around, expecting to see him standing there with his dark eyes and his sardonic smile and that cigarette but he's always too fast for her, she never catches him. She mutters in disgust at the fag. "Filthy Muggle habit," she'll say.

"Like I care about Muggles," he says, taking another drag. "It's all about power, Ginevra; I told you that. The path changes, that's all."

He's in mirrors and windows and she won't look at the trophies at Hogwarts anymore because there's always a flicker of his cigarette, always a flash of those hands with blood on them. He's always happy to see her, smiling at her with eyes that crinkle with pleasure even as she hurriedly look away. Even as she looks back. No one else tracks her with as much care, no one else follows her everywhere.

"I wish you'd go away," she says one day, not sure she means it.

"Can't," he responds. "I poured myself into you and now I'm here, stuck in your pretty head." He takes a long drag and adds, "Go fuck your boyfriend, Ginevra. I'll be here when you're done."

He is, of course. She's careful to angle herself while the innocent thrusts into her so she can't see any reflections anywhere. Lying in her bed after she's chased the fool away, the fool she can chase away, she runs a knife over her palm and looks at the blood as it wells up, looks at the glowing red ember in the reflection on the blade. "Could I cut you out?" she wonders aloud and catches a whiff of nicotine lingering in the air.

At home she walks, a ghost herself in a family that shoos her away as they make plans and worry and fret about the monster who's come back. About her monster. Not, of course, that anyone thinks to ask her. Not that anyone considers she might have a unique perspective.

Not that she's sure she'd tell them anything. She's just a child, locked out of the important meetings.

She gets a broom from the shed to the unheard, "Don't go too fast," and points herself directly up into the moon. "How did you learn to fly?" The voice taunts and teases her, here even in the night away from mirror and windows and reflections of what's inside her.

"I snuck into the shed at night," she whispers into the cold air. "I learned in darkness and silence because they worried too much."

"Were the boys – "

"Stop!" She puts her hands over her ears but you can't block out what's in your head. "They love me. They worry."

"Like they did when I owned you?" The voice is light. "If you say so. Love is not my specialty and I will defer to you if you say holding you down is love. That not seeing you is love."

She grabs the broom handle again, whirls around, but she is alone in the air as the voice says, very softly, "You can fly, Ginevra."

She throws the broom into the shed and pushes her way back into the house. "Ginny!" The raised voice in the warm light of the kitchen summons her and she pushes away shadows and blood and makes her way to her mother's side. "Help me clean up."

"Where's Ron?" she asks, sullen again as she holds her hand out for the dishes to sort.

Her mother passes her a plate without seeing the white line on her extended palm, without seeing the hatch marks on her forearm. "He and Harry are upstairs," she says.

"Why isn't he helping?" Ginny demands as a bloody mouth smiles at her from the faucet.

"Harry is a guest," her mother says. "You're family."

She stares into the mirror in her room as Tom gazes back. He's silent for once, just leans up against her dresser and smokes the cigarette that never burns down as he watches her. "Why are you haunting me?" she asks at last.

"You're holding on to me," he tells her. "If you didn't care I'd fade."

"I don't care," she insists. "I hate you."

He shrugs. "Hate is caring."

"I'm alone," she whispers, reaching a hand out toward the mirror as though she could walk into it and join him.

"I do still exist outside your head," he says, taking a long, slow drag. The ember of his lit cigarette is the brightest thing in the room.

She throws a book at the mirror and it shatters to the sound of laughter. When everyone asks if she's okay she just says, "I thought I saw something."

Harry looks embarrassed for her and she turns away from him to the dozens of Toms smiling up at her. "I'll get a broom," she says. "I'll clean it up. I don't know what I was thinking."

"You probably weren't," Ron mutters as he disappears, Harry behind him.

Tom's reflection from the knife watches her as she plunges it into the gift she's bringing him, the gift she'll give the one of them who still exists in a world she can touch.


	13. Siren Song (Tom-mermaid)

You see them as a boy, swimming past the windows. They wave and smile and their hair flows in the water in ways that defies the currents and when you ask why the windows are soundproofed the professor laughs. The sound of a mermaid singing, he says, no one can resist it. They'd lure you to your death if they could.

And you watch them and vow to hear them. Vow to survive hearing them.

You stand at the rocks, years of study behind you, and listen. They sing, voices like the fall of night, voices like the stars you can't reach, voices like the gold that would fix all your problems and you let yourself dive into the waves, shoes left on the shore, and swim toward that glory.

She's on the rocks, combing her hair, her tail swishing back and forth as she licks her sharp teeth and you swim and you swim and you smile up at her and just as she reaches for you, you toss the net over her.

Her singing is just as beautiful when she's enraged. She sings of power and blood and vengeance and you laugh as you haul her to shore, tied and bound and yours.

You'll sing for me, you tell her when you've put her in the aquarium. You'll sing when I tell you to or you won't eat.

And she sings. She sings of power and beauty and loss and you stand pressed against the glass of her cage and listen and she licks her teeth and she listen and you find yourself dragging a chair over so you can climb up and hear her better. Just a little closer you tell yourself. Just a little closer.

You've never noticed how pretty her skin in. You want to touch her hair.

You reach down to pet your pretty, singing captive.

Those teeth are very sharp.

She wears you like a dress, like a cloak, like a pair of shoes and you – she – climbs back down the chair. You – she – walks out the door and she's devouring you with every step of your own feet as you - she – walks to the shore.

She leaves you kicked off and abandoned on the rocks as she dives in, you've been sliced into pieces and worn like a disguise but you lift your head to hear her singing fade as she swims away and you return to the mud and rocks and sand of the coast.


	14. You Can Stay Here (Remione)

Remus was 19 when he fell through what he supposed must be called a force field. He was 19, freshly graduated from Hogwarts with his friends very freshly dead, betrayed by a man they'd - he'd - considered a brother in war he hated. Poor, despised, friendless, and outcast he'd reached the stage of nothing left to lose.

Freedom, he supposed.

Freedom meant when he saw the shimmering wall of pure magic he shrugged and walked through it. Freedom meant nothing mattered. Maybe, he thought as he took the first step, it was a Veil and he'd see James and Lily again.

The other side didn't, however, offer up beloved friends. It offered up a conventional, light-filled flat with a bushy-haired girl who was engaged in what seemed to be a screaming fight with a ginger boy. "I have had it with you," she screeched. "You are still just a prejudiced, narrow-minded pureblood elitist, no better than Malfoy! Get out, get out, get out!"

"Merlin, Hermione," he said. "He's just a bloody centaur. No need to be -"

The girl raised her wand and pointed it at her foe, who held his hands up in supplication and backed toward the door. "I'm going, I'm going," he said. Remus cringed when the boy added, almost under his breath, "I'll come back when you aren't on the rag."

The girl sent a children's stinging hex at the boy who yelped and slammed the door behind him. "Arsehole," she muttered, and was about to throw he wand down when she caught a glimpse of Remus and turned into an immediate defensive crouch. "Who are you?" she demanded.

Remus guessed by the way she moved the war wasn't over. "Remus," he said. Then, taking a risk, he asked, "You a Phoenix or a Snake."

She narrowed her eyes a didn't lower her wand. "Phoenix," she said. "Though I'm a tad confused how you don't know me. Golden girl and all that. If there's one more article about me in that damned _Prophet_ I might outpace Harry."

Remus' heart skipped a beat. It wasn't possible. "Harry?" he asked.

"Have you been under a rock?" his mystery girl - Hermione, apparently - demanded. "Harry Potter."

The room started going white and Remus' feet fell out from under him somehow and he was sitting on the floor with his back to this girl's wall and she was squatting next to him with her hand on his forehead. "What year is it," he asked her. When she told him he started doing math in his head and began to laugh and cry at the same time. James' son, James' orphaned son, was as old as he was. He had survived. He had, it seemed, a friend in this girl. "Did we win?" Remus asked through the hysteria.

She stood up and offered him her hand. "Let me get you a cup of tea," she suggested. "I'll explain. I haven't much to eat in my flat - I'm not one for cooking - but I think I have some chocolate covered biscuits that should help with whatever shock you've just had." She frowned. "What year do you think it is" she asked as she helped him up and waved at him to follow her to a small kitchenette where she put water on.

He told her and her composure faltered for a moment. "We won," she said, the simple words taking a weight off his shoulders. "That monster is dead, Harry's alive, no thanks to his own urges toward martyrdom, and I'm alive." She took a deep breath. "A lot of people died. Sirius. Dumbledore. Tonks. Fred." Her voice broke on that last one.

"Sirius can rot in Azkaban," Remus said, the wound of that betrayal fresh and aching.

And then she told him. She told him everything. They ate all the biscuits and put the kettle on a second, then a third time. They ordered some kind of Muggle takeaway that made his eyes widen with the realization this witch, like Lily, was Muggle-born

and used to walking between the worlds. When Remus heard that Sirius had been innocent, had escaped prison to try to save Harry, he'd started to shake. Twelve years. Twelve years in hell and his first thought, only thought, had been to protect James' son. He'd wronged the man. Oh, gods, how he'd wronged him.

"The fourth Marauder just disappeared," she said. "People assumed you'd died."

"I wanted to," he admitted. Only hours ago he'd wanted to. She was fascinated by the story of the story of the wall of shimmering light he'd found. He could see her look over at her bookshelf as though she'd find the answer there. What was it? Why had it moved him forward in time? Why had it dumped him in her living room of all places? Finally she muttered something about going up to the library at Hogwarts and figuring it out and moved on to practicalities. She was, Remus would come to discover, an almost terrifyingly practical girl.

"You can stay here," she said. "That would probably be easiest."

"I can't." He searched for an excuse. "I don't want to be a bother."

She mostly ignored him as she set about washing up the dishes. "It's no bother," she said. "I just finished up an extra year at Hogwarts to do my N.E.W.T.s so I'm used to having people around. It's been weird living alone, to be honest. I have a spare room and it's not as though you have any place else to go right now. You might as well stay here while you figure things out." She added with a conspiratorial grin, "Plus, I need you to answer all sorts of questions about that wall of light."

"I can't," Remus said desperately.

"Why not?" She raised her brows and studied him, her hands on her hips as she waited for an answer.

"I'm a werewolf," he choked out at last and waited for her to recoil in horror and order him from her home, assuming she didn't kill him outright.

Instead she glanced at the calendar and said, "So? It's nearly a new moon. You have plenty of time to start drinking wolfsbane and I can always ward the guest room when you change if that would make you more comfortable."

"I can't afford wolfsbane," he said.

Hermione Granger, who was apparently his new roommate, looked at him in utter perplexity. "I can brew it," she said in a tone that indicated that was obvious and she thought a little less of him that he'd doubted that. He must have looked dubious - it was a complicated potion after all - so she said, "I made my first batch of Polyjuice at twelve. I support myself doing freelance brewing. I assure you, I can brew Wolfsbane. I could probably do it in my sleep." She looked excited for a moment. "I wonder if I can make it better. If you're _here_ I could… I've had some ideas about ways to make the person not just remain in control but to make the transition painless." She looked suddenly embarrassed. "The bathroom's basically a potions lab. I'm sorry about that, it's just - "

"I think I can live with that," Remus said, studying her. She had, he realized, beautiful eyes: dark and clever and prone to sparkling when she had an idea she was considering.

"Ron hated it," she muttered.

Ron, Remus assumed, was the ginger boy she'd hexed out of her flat after he expressed contempt for centaurs. Ron, Remus decided, would not be coming back in any meaningful way.

"Why my living room," Hermione wondered aloud before she said. "Oh, Merlin, you have to meet Harry. I'll write him right now. He'll be… meeting you… be prepared to answer a million questions about James." She hugged him spontaneously before she pulled out a sheet of parchment and began writing a note and Remus inhaled the scent of her hair. Old parchment and freshly cut herbs and something else he couldn't quite put his finger on.

He was sure, given enough time, he'd figure it out.

Time, after all, seemed to have decided to be his friend today.

. . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - A gift for shayalonnie, who makes all the writing happier._**


	15. Smart (Pansy-Hermione)

**for claraxbarton**

* * *

The thing about Pansy, Hermione said to anyone who would listen, was that she was smart. People asked her constantly why she'd ended up with the woman who had tried to turn Harry - your best friend, Hermione, people would say - over to Voldemort. It's that she's smart, Hermione would say. And pretty. If she'd had too much to drink and Ron was being particularly obnoxious she might add that Pansy also had impeccable manners.

They'd fallen into a partnership by accident. Ron hadn't worked out and Draco had run off and married that tepid Astoria Greengrass and a night of mutual 'drown our sorrows' in the same pub had led to bitter and detailed recounting of the failings of each of the men who had rejected them and that had led to the pronouncement that all men did, indeed, fail miserably as human beings, and from there Pansy had declared that life would be perfect if only she could be a lesbian.

Hermione had looked at her and, emboldened by too much wine, had asked the seemingly abstract question of could you know you weren't if you'd never tried it. "I've sampled men," Hermione had told her very seriously. "Too many men. Victor Krum, international Quidditch star. Cormac McClaggan, the pig, still sends me indecent photographs of himself. Ronald. I've had enough from the man buffet to last a lifetime. But I've never - "

Pansy had picked up the thrown gauntlet and said her flat was just 'round the corner and that in the name of pure research they owed it to themselves to discover the truth.

They sampled one another and conducted research until the sun came up and was much too bright and Pansy, propped on one elbow, said, "I want to die from this hangover and if you leave before I wake up again I will kill you."

Hermione had sprawled across the bed, one leg dangling off the side, and had muttered only, "Too late; I think I'm already dead. You broke me."

"No one ever died of too many orgasms," Pansy had said.

The last thing Hermione mumbled before she fell asleep on Pansy's sheets was, "Not that we know of, no. Not yet."

She didn't leave when she finally got up and stumbled into Pansy's shower, and she didn't leave when she went back to own flat to get her cat and her books and her clothes and she didn't leave when a sneering Draco Malfoy made comments about how she was Pansy's walk on the wild and dirty side.

Pansy, as it turned out, had a mean left hook and no hesitation in using it. Draco stumbled away clutching his nose and muttering they were crazy and deserved each other. She was also brittle, and, under her snippy exterior, she was as fragile as the most delicate bit of blown glass and when her feelings were hurt she'd narrow her eyes and grind her teeth and go off alone, convinced she was worthless and despicable and unwanted and Hermione would follow and distract her with talk about Ministry scandals and whatever book she was reading until Pansy would mutter, "Why do you like me, anyway? I'm a disaster."

"You're good in bed," Hermione would say. It made Pansy laugh every time until the day Hermione added, "and I love you."

She cried that day.

Draco Malfoy sent his regrets to their wedding along with an expensive and hideous crystal peacock.

"Regift it?" Hermione asked, hefting the thing in her hand in disgust.

"Hell no," Pansy said. "I don't hate anyone enough to give them that."

Hermione looked at her, then looked at the most recent photograph Cormac had sent. "Oh, yes, you do," she said.

The shipping expense was brutal but, considering that Cormac never sent another photograph, Pansy would say to anyone who would listen, in the end it was a smart investment.


	16. Things in Common (Tom-Ginny)

She hated Muggles.

 _Hated_ them.

She knew it wasn't right to hate anyone, much less a group of anyones, but a lifetime of poverty she blamed on her father's bizarre obsession with people so stunted they didn't even have magic had built a prejudice layer by slow layer.

By the time her mum bought her Hogwarts supplies, third-hand books and used robes and fretting about whether Percy's cauldron was still any good or do they need another one, Ginny stood in the aisle as her mother counted out coins and narrowed her eyes and asked the unspeakable question. "Why can't dad just get a job in a better department?" she demanded. "Why not something else - anything else - instead of filthy _Muggles_?"

Her mother was horrified. She clasped a hand over her youngest child's mouth right there in the shop and hissed, "Don't speak that way."

Lucius Malfoy, who'd overheard the entire exchange, smiled down at her. "Don't scold the child for asking what everyone wonders, Molly," he said. "She seems charming to me. Honest. Forthright. I'd be proud of a daughter who saw so clearly."

Draco Malfoy, standing at his father's side, blond and smug and arrogant, gave Ginny a grin that was half mean, half conspiratorial. "Maybe you'll get sorted into Slytherin," he said. "You're no Muggle-born."

Molly Weasley scowled at the pair. "She'll get into Gryffindor like all her brothers before her," she said.

"Or you'll what?" Lucius Malfoy asked smoothly. "Burn her from the family tapestry?" He smiled down at Ginny again. "If she does," he said. "Narcissa and I would be delighted to take you in."

"See you at Hogwarts," Draco said. Ginny tried to give him a little wave but her mother was already dragging her out of the store, purchases heaped in the new cauldron she had decided was necessary after all.

"I have never been so embarrassed," she said, hand clamped on Ginny's upper arm. "And in front of the Malfoys too." She huffed out a loud snort. "You'll go to your room and think about what you've done, missy, and you'll get into Gryffindor and you'll steer clear of that boy, do you understand me?"

"Perfectly," Ginny said, wrenching her arm away.

Once in her room, sitting on her sagging bed with its patched and repatched quilt, she pulled the worn books out of her new cauldron with a sigh and began putting them into her school trunk, the one that had been Bill's. One book she didn't recognize: it was an expensive leather diary with a boy's name embossed on the front in gold lettering. A quick flip through the pages showed no one had ever written in it and, with a sullen look at her closed door, she decided _not_ to tell her mum they seemed to have ended up with an extra book by mistake. Instead she pulled out a quill, turned to the first page and began to write.

 _Dear Diary. My name is Ginny Weasley. I'm eleven years old, about to start Hogwarts, and I hate Muggles. Hate them_. _I don't want to be in Gryffindor and I don't want to be poor anymore._

The ink splattered when she jabbed her quill too hard at the final period but she looked at her first entry with pleasure. There. At last she'd said it. Seeing the words written down made her feel a kind of furious pleasure.

Then the words swirled away and she stared at the blank page in shock until new words appeared.

 _Hello Ginny. My name is Tom Riddle. It's nice to meet you. I think we might have a few things in common._

 _. . . . . . . . . ._

 ** _A/N - A quick drabble inspired by KodeV_**


	17. In Every Way (Harry-Pansy)

It took Ginny Weasley and Harry Potter one year, three months, and seventeen days to break up after the Battle of Hogwarts. It would have happened sooner, but with Ginny at Hogwarts for most of the year the way their goals were so different didn't become a problem at first. She wanted to play professional Quidditch, was good enough to play professional Quidditch, and had every intention of doing just that. It wasn't that she didn't love Harry; she just loved her own life more.

Also, he hovered.

Worse, he wanted her to hover.

He wanted her there every moment of every day. He needed constant reassurance she wasn't dead. The war had traumatized him and his miserable childhood had traumatized him and Ginny, Ginny who'd recovered from a year long possession with no help from anyone, Ginny who had bloody well bounced back to be stronger and more self-assured and more certain she'd live her life for herself, Ginny had no patience for his trauma or his hovering or his neediness.

She admitted to herself this was a character flaw, bid Harry a mostly sad but slightly relieved farewell, and took off for Quidditch training.

Ron found the entire situation awkward. He couldn't exactly call his sister a right bitch the way he would have any other woman who dumped his best friend; he was left clapping Harry on the back, mumbling, and then asking Hermione if he'd bungled it.

"Probably," she said. "I'll go see him tomorrow and see how he's doing."

"Go in the afternoon," Ron advised. "He said he was going to hit the pub tonight."

Hermione let out an exasperated huff but agreed that she'd wait until after lunch. "How much trouble can he get in in one night anyway?" she asked.

"Exactly," Ron said. "Voldemort's dead and all his arsehole followers are rounded up. Harry'll just get good and pissed and be grateful for the hangover potion you bring him."

Ron's prediction proved to be inaccurate.

When Harry got to the pub he had barely sat down when he began to wish he'd gone elsewhere. A far too familiar pale blond head was arguing in hissed tones with a woman hidden in the shadows. Harry sighed and took the pint the waitress handed him - a major benefit of being the chosen one was fast service - and started to pick his way across the pub; he couldn't let Draco-sodding-Malfoy pick on some poor, helpless victim.

He was almost there when the poor, helpless victim tossed her drink in Malfoy's face and the prat snapped, "Fine, be that way, you bloody pain in my arse," before stalking off and disappearing out a side door. Harry squinted at the woman Malfoy had abandoned; the light behind her that had made Malfoy's ridiculous hair glow blinded him and he still couldn't make out her features.

"I realize I'm not the Chosen One," she said, "so I'm not quite as famous as you are, but we went to a very small school so it's a tad disingenuous to pretend you don't know me."

He knew her voice.

"Pansy Parkinson." Harry wished he hadn't come to this pub, wished he hasn't decided to walk over here, wished he had the faintest idea what to do now.

"Oh, just sit down," she said. He went to pull out a chair and she added, "Not that one."

"Why not?" Harry asked. "Is that one special or something?"

"Fine, sit on it," Pansy said. "It's just that it's wet from when - "

"The drink, right," Harry said. He looked at the table and finally decided the seat closest to Pansy was probably safely dry and eased into it. He'd sat down before he realized he was so close to her they looked like they were having a tete-a-tete.

Pansy signaled the waitress who brought a shot of something golden without asking what she wanted. At Harry's confused look Pansy said, "Put it on his tab."

Harry nodded, somewhat bemusedly, at the waitress who shrugged.

"What did I just buy you?" Harry asked.

"Fire whiskey," Pansy said. "18-year, small batch, oak barrel aged fire whiskey, to be precise. McClaffard." Harry nodded and she began to laugh. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" She waved the waitress back over.

Three hours later Harry has had quite the education. He had learned Pansy Parkinson thought Draco Malfoy was a pompous, cold prat. "I had the biggest crush on him when we were sixteen," she'd said after one shot. "Merlin, I was so stupid."

"He can't kiss," she'd said after two.

Harry put a hand over her mouth before she began to share any more Malfoy facts after shot number three. It wasn't that he didn't like hearing the pompous prat was, well, a prat. He liked that quite a bit. He was just concerned Pansy might go into more detail about Malfoy's failings than he wanted to hear from a woman he'd started to notice was not quite as ugly as Hermione had always claimed.

Hermione could, Harry reflected, be a little assertive in her opinions.

Pansy did not, however, just talk about Draco Malfoy.

He also learned a lot about whiskey - probably more than a person should in one night - and he got a few hints about her. He also told her quite a bit more then he probably should have about Ginny. She listened to him ramble on and finally cocked her head to the side and said, "Let me get this straight. She didn't like having attention focused on her?" When Harry nodded she finished what was in her glass with one smooth movement, signaled the waitress, and said, "Damn, you Gryffindors are so weird."

Harry recalled that the crux of her irritation with Malfoy he seemed to have been that he ignored everything but his own reflection and his mother.

"Not that I'd want all the attention you get from the press, mind you," Pansy said. "That would be horrific."

"I hate it," Harry said. He stared into what he thought was his fourth shot of fire whiskey but which might have been his fifth and said with gloomy honesty, "I wish they would all leave me alone."

"Then you probably shouldn't have done that spread on the most eligible bachelor in all of Britain," Pansy said with a snort as she accepted another shot from the waitress. "Getting published in Witch Weekly - especially wear what you weren't wearing, so to speak - isn't a good way to keep a low profile."

"It was for charity" Harry muttered. "All of the proceeds of the sales went to a fund for war orphans."

Pansy rolled her eyes. "You're an idiot," she said.

"No," Harry protested. "They told me - it was in the contract - all of the proceeds from sales of that issue went to charity."

"Advertising revenue?" Pansy asked. At his blank look she buried her face in her hands and shook her head. "Did it even occur to you to have your ridiculously swotty and horrible friend Granger look over the contract?" Harry continued to look confused so Pansy explained to him, in more detail than he has ever cared to know, how most magazine revenue came not from the individual sales of the issues but from advertising revenue and that he'd been quite thoroughly exploited.

Harry finished what might've been his fourth, or perhaps his fifth, shot and signaled for another.

"You need a fucking keeper," Pansy said, watching him and waving away the attentive barmaid.

There didn't seem to be a good response to that. Harry found himself mumbling something about how that sounded great but Hermione was a little busy with Ron and Ginny had _just_ made it clear that she wasn't interested.

Pansy threw back the last of her most recent drink and then reached down to the floor to rescue a hot pink leather bag. Harry was staring at the giant pink patent leather bow that adorned the woman's purse and Pansy had to shake the vial she'd pulled out in his face. "Sobriety potion," she said. "I don't think you're going to make it home without one."

"It's fine," Harry said, "I can walk home from here." He smiled at her with what he hoped was engaging charm. "Want to see my flat?"

Pansy waved the vial again. "I want to see more than that," she said, "but not if you're pissed."

Harry regarded her, then the corked vial, then her. "What the hell," he said, and pulling the cork out, he drank the blue liquid down.

He was sputtering in horror when she said, "I probably should have warned you it tastes like donkey arse."

Harry considered asking her how she knew what donkey arse tasted like but, given what she'd shared about Malfoy, discarded that idea before she'd swallowed her own dose of potion, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and said, "Why are we still here?"

When Hermione arrived at Harry's flat the next afternoon ready to commiserate about Ginny and reassure Harry he was a great guy and everything would be fine, she let herself in, hangover potion tucked into her bag, only to stop and stare at her best friend - best friend since she'd been eleven - as he laughed at something _Pansy Parkinson_ had said.

Pansy Parkinson, who was wearing _very_ little.

"Close your mouth, Granger, before you attract flies," Parkinson advised.

"Hermione," Harry said. "Uh, you know Pansy."

She didn't, not really, though she did eventually. Not as well as Harry, of course. "I'd rather die," was Ron's opinion on knowing the woman that well, though he managed to be civil whenever they got together and eventually became a fan of Pansy's butterbeer shots. Ginny seemed mostly relieved Harry had moved on so easily and sent the couple tickets to her Quidditch matches. Draco Malfoy never became quite comfortable with the idea that Harry Potter had made off with his ex.

"He just knows I'm comparing you two," Pansy said.

"And that he's losing?" Harry asked.

Pansy kissed him and leaned into him so that her head rested on his shoulder. "In every way," she murmured. "In every way."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - For somebluenovember**


	18. Tell Me Everything (Remus-Hermione)

**A/N - A plot bunny that escaped for Shayalonnie**

* * *

Hermione was tired, petulant, sulky and in an all around bad mood. She'd gotten into it with Ron _again_ about her cat and his stupid rat. She'd come from another class with Professor Lupin and felt the usual weird lurch in her stomach whenever he made eye contact with her, something he seemed to try not to do, and she wanted to talk to someone about it but, between her embarrassing crush on Gilderoy Lockhart the previous year and Ron and Harry's general prattishness this year, she didn't have anyone. All this left her in a mood that had her eyeing her time turner as though it were somehow _its_ fault.

She held it up and regarded in and then gave it a vicious swipe that sent it spinning. She regretted the impulsive gesture as soon as she made it; she knew it was a bad idea. She'd end up back a couple of hours and that would make this awful day even longer than it already had been. She waited for the mechanism to slow and stop so she could check the time. Maybe she'd just go hide in the back of the library and take a nap until she caught up with herself.

That excellent plan never happened. Instead of slowing the time turner seemed to pick up speed until it whirled faster and faster and everything was wrong and blurry and jerking and she looked around her Gryffindor dorm room as it spun and faded and the time turner was still going. She fell to her knees, the chain clutched in one hand and her wand in the other, as nausea overtook her and the time turner was still spinning. She didn't see it stop because by the time it did she'd folded over on herself and was vomiting out the whole of the contents of her stomach onto slowly stabilizing the stone floor.

"Ewww," she heard someone say.

Great. Lavender had come in and found her sicking up.

But when she looked up she saw a girl she didn't know who was making a show of holding her nose and another girl with dark red hair who was squatting down and saying, "Are you okay? Where did you come from?"

She looked up right into Harry's green eyes.

"I don't know," Hermione managed to get out, slipping the chain of the time-turner back around her neck and tucking it into her shirt. "I was in my room and then everything began to spin and I was here."

"I'm Lily," the girl said, holding out her hand to help her up. She vanished the vomit with a flick of her wand and gave the nose-holding girl a quelling look before she added, "Let me walk you to the Infirmary."

On the way to the Infirmary Hermione, who still felt like she'd come off the world carnival ride ever and right after eating too many sweets at that, learned that Lily Evans was a third year student. She was a Muggle-born. She loved Hogwarts and Potions was her favorite class.

Hermione managed not to break into hysterics. She managed not to ask what the girl thought of one James Potter. She managed to just nod and smile and when the girl dropped her off, promising to return to check on her later, Hermione sank onto the cot in the Infirmary, felt the time-turner whose fault this absolute was pull on her neck, and buried her face in her hands. There was no way to go forward. Professor McGonagall and the Unspeakable who'd trusted her with the time-turner had made that absolutely clear. You could go back, but you had to live those hours again. It was a one way trip. She was in Hogwarts when Harry Potter's parents were thirteen-years old and she was stuck here.

She considered going to Headmaster Dumbledore and then dismissed that idea. He'd set them on quests involving killer, giant dogs, into the not-all-that-Forbidden-after-all Forest and left Harry in a basket on a doorstep She didn't think he'd be all that helpful.

Professor McGonagall arrived after she'd been in the Infirmary about an hour. Apparently the Gryffindor who'd appeared from nowhere had become her problem. She briskly confiscated the time turner, tsked, and promised to find Hermione a place to stay over the summers. She asked Hermione a few questions about her own time and Hermione began to answer only to realize everything had gone fuzzy. The world she knew, everything she knew, was fading away like a dream.

"I don't remember," she said, horrified. She knew there was something absolutely important she had to tell this woman. Something crucial. But the harder she tried to grab at it the more it eluded her. Everything eluded her and she began to cry. Her shoulders shook and her body shook and she collapsed in on itself as she realized she'd somehow gone back into the time of… someone. Who? She knew that girl, Lily. She knew all about her. She knew her eyes. They were someone's eyes, but whose?

McGonagall patted her on the shoulder. "Probably a side effect of going back too far. I can't believe someone was so irresponsible as to give one of these to a third year. If I knew who it was, I'd have a few things to say to them." She stood to go. "You rest now, Miss Granger. We'll get you settled in in no time. In the meanwhile, I'll send Miss Evans in with your dinner. She's got a crew of hoodlum friends and they'll cheer you up."

Hermione smiled a watery smile at the woman and tried to brace herself and cut off her ridiculous emotional display. So what if she was alone in the world, couldn't remember anything personal about her own time, and had a pounding headache. None of that was reason to cry. She was British. She was a British witch and she had this.

She lay down and closed her eyes and when she opened them again Lily Evans was back, this time with four boys in tow. That seemed familiar. Hermione shook her head and smiled her thanks as the girl set a tray down. "It should be the prefect's job," Lily said, "but I figured you'd rather see a familiar face."

"Plus she's the nicest person alive," said a boy with messy dark hair who was passing a Snitch from one hand to the other.

"Shut it, Potter," she snapped, without turning to look at him. "Toerag. No one asked you."

Another boy, with long dark hair that obscured his eyes and a sulky mouth laughed. "If you hate him so much, go suck up to Snivellus," he suggested. "I'm sure he'd be happy for your company."

"Severus is good friend," Lily said. "And you should be nicer, Sirius."

"Probably," this Sirius admitted. "But I won't be."

Lily sighed. "Hermione, meet some of the Gryffindor crew in our year. James Potter is the one who's trying to impress you with how well he handles his balls."

Sirius sniggered.

"Sirius is the prat."

Sirius pushed his hair out of his eyes and made an elaborate bow in her direction. "Any project of Lily's is a friend of ours," he said. He smirked a moment before he added, "Except Snivellus."

"Who's Snivellus?" Hermione asked.

"Severus Snape," James said with obvious disgust. "He's gross. Stuck on himself, never bathes — "

"He's my friend," Lily said firmly. "And if you want to be too, you'll cut it out." James closed his mouth and became fascinated with his Snitch. Lily waved toward a slightly pudgy boy half-hiding behind Sirius. "The shy one is Peter."

Peter raised a hand and hesitantly waved at her.

Hermione turned her attention to the fourth boy and felt her stomach lurch and was afraid she was going to be sick again. He was small and thin, with mousy brown hair and a small smile that quirked up when he saw her and then disappeared as a look of consternation came over his face.

"And that's Remus," Lily said. She sounded both less sure about this one and more defensive, as though she expected Hermione to somehow recoil from the slight boy and was prepared to go to war on his behalf.

"Hi," Hermione said shyly.

"Hi," Remus said. He rubbed his hands on his trousers as if he were nervous and gulped as he stared and stared at Hermione. She stared back, her stomach doing flip-flops as she felt something click into place somewhere deep within her and a voice whispered in her head, "So _this_ is why the time-turner went crazy."

"Merlin, Moony, I've never seen you stare at a girl like that before," Sirius said with a low whistle. "Have we finally found your type? Who knew you went for the mysterious, vomiting ones."

"Shut it, Black," James and Lily said in unison and Sirius Black laughed, but he sounded a trifle uneasy rather than amused.

"I'll sit with her," Remus offered. Sirius looked like he might say something else but Lily glared at him and he shut his mouth. The others filed out, turning to give worried looks to the girl on the bed and their friend as he pulled a chair up and said, "So, tell me about yourself." He took a deep breath. "Tell me _everything._ "

There wasn't much to tell. His eyes widened and grew soft with sympathy as she explained how she'd forgotten so much. She wasn't sure when he took her hand, maybe it was sometime after he'd pulled the tray away and set it on the empty cot next to them. She only knew she never wanted him to let go. She told him everything he told her he'd been ill a lot as a child, that he hadn't thought he'd be allowed to come to Hogwarts, that the people she'd met were the first friends he'd ever had. Sometime in that conversation he joined her on the cot and she ran her fingers through his curls and he closed his eyes as if her touch burned him and as if he never wanted her to stop.

Well, she felt the same way.

It was dark and probably long past curfew when he said, sounding like he was terrified, "There's something you need to know. About me. Something bad."

She shook her head. "There couldn't be anything bad about you." She wasn't sure how she knew this, only that she did. "You'd never hurt anyone. Never take advantage of anyone. You'd let yourself suffer to prevent that."

He gulped. Then he told her.

She looked out the window at the tiny, crescent moon.

"So that's why 'Moony'," she said at last as he tensed beside her. "That sounds interesting. Tell me everything."

So he did.

 **~ finis ~**


	19. World Enough & Time (TomVolde-Hermione)

Tom Riddle, Lord Voldemort, he who flees death, looked in the mirror. His face hadn't aged since his third horcrux - that appeared to have been the magic number that not only guaranteed immortality but also halted his progression through time - and, if anything, he'd gotten better at hiding the cruel glint that made his eyes crease up as if he were enjoying a joke no one else quite understood.

A joke at their expense.

He shrugged and the monster glamour settled into place with its pale skin and red eyes. He smiled at the visage. He so enjoyed this. Appearances were nothing but a tool to gain power; in his actual youth being handsome had drawn people to him. Now being a monster filled them with fear and kept them doing his bidding.

They were fools, all of them, unable to see beneath whichever surface he presented.

"My Lord."

He turned. Bellatrix cringed at the door, both leaning toward him as if she couldn't help herself, and pulling away, afraid he'd strike her. He tried to remember what he'd found interesting in this woman when he'd first met her but couldn't. Even her loyalty seemed tedious, and the way she hadn't been unable to stay sane in Azkaban irritated him. He'd been incorporeal for years, barely alive, he'd had to be recreated from a cauldron, and he was still as rational as he'd been before. That his followers couldn't seem to endure even a single year in prison, much less twelve, without breaking only made him want to shatter them more and see how many pieces he could make of them before they stopped working altogether.

"I have the Mudblood for you," she said. "The other two got away, but we kept her."

"Bring her," he said, waving toward a chaise in his room and controlling his urge to just crucio the woman in front of him. Her obsession with blood purity grated on every last nerve. Don't you understand, he wanted to snap at her. It's just a lever to manipulate you. I no more care about blood status than I do about your lamentable fashion choices. I just use it to control you. If you'd been a religious fanatic, I would have used that. You and yours were bigots so instead I pushed that button. All that matters is power.

He'd come to the conclusion he'd do just about anything to have a companion who wasn't a bloody idiot. He didn't expect an _equal_ \- Lord Voldemort had no equals - but someone who wasn't an imbecile would be a pleasure he'd cherish. He'd set the world at the feet of someone who had the ability to keep up with him, even if only to amuse himself.

He was starting to realize that the main problem of immortality was likely to be boredom.

Instead he just waited as his idiot followers brought in the unconscious body of the bushy-haired girl who trailed after Harry Potter with books in her hands. He sighed; they'd had such a go at her it was a wonder she was even alive. How was he supposed to learn anything from the mind of a dead prisoner? He glared at his Death Eaters until they fled and then, with a wave of one hand, healed the girl. No point in having her die before he'd rooted around in her thoughts and found out what Harry Potter, symbol and soon-to-be-martyr, was up to.

Even in her state her body sagged from the relief of no pain; he cupped a hand around her chin and used the physical contact to enter her mind, expecting the usual mishmash of incoherent drivel, tedious lusts, and embarrassing childhood moments he'd have to sort through to discover what he wanted. People assumed being a Legilimens meant he could find out anything with just a quick look around; it was a bit more like sorting through a box of parchment collected by an elderly man with dementia. The things the brain hung onto were peculiar at best, and most often useless.

The mind of this girl, however, almost made him drop her chin. He began to smile as he picked one bit of well-organized history after another out of her thoughts. She was brilliant, that was clear. And driven. And cold - oh, this one was cold. She'd burn the world to the ground to get what she wanted done without stopping to consider the cost. Only eighteen, Voldemort mused to himself, and she's already created Dark hexes, consigned people to brutal abuse, and attacked people who upset her for even the most trivial reasons.

And she was sane.

He hadn't expected that. It wouldn't have deterred him, of course. Years of sorting through Bellatrix's thoughts had made him more than adept at dealing with insanity, but he found himself impressed she'd endured the attentions of his Death Eaters and remained in control of her thoughts. That was… rare.

She was rare.

He liked rare things. He liked _collecting_ rare things.

He dropped her chin and considered the unconscious girl. He wondered what it would take to make her love him. He wondered what it would take to make her accept she was just as Dark as he was.

Well, he intended to find out.

After all, he had all the time in the world.

. . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - for lovecommatiffany, who wanted a tomione but, alas, this is what my brain dumped out. The title is, of course, a reference to the Andrew Marvell poem, To His Coy Mistress._**


	20. World Enough & Time, part 2

**World Enough and Time… the epilogue**

Voldemort collects her. She makes a bargain to spare her friends and he agrees to it.

He murders almost all the Death Eaters because it's rude to torture the Dark Lady. What? She wasn't the Dark Lady at the time and how were they to have known? A good evil minion stays on top of these things. Avada Kedavra.

With most of the Death Eaters out of the picture, the Ministry offers a wholly predicable political amnesty to Voldemort.

Who adores Hermione far more than he thought he would.

Within ten years, she's Minister of Magic.

Voldemort offers a research grant for the development of another Philosopher's Stone because Hermione absolutely refuses to make a Horcrux.

It takes about seven years but some weird kid in his basement finally manages it.

He has an unfortunate accident, leaving Voldemort sole possessor of the Philosopher's Stone. You really shouldn't take research grants from evil sociopaths.

Hermione licenses a dilute form of the Elixir of Life to Draco Malfoy, who markets it, and they all get so filthy rich even money becomes boring.

The end.


	21. Theo-Luna Ficlet

The curse caught her off guard. It hurt terribly, more than most of them, and when she fell to her knees and then her side, her cheek pressed into the damp earth of the forest floor, a beetle caught her eye even as her attacker yanked her wand from her hand.

The beetle scurried off and disappeared under a half-upturned rock, wriggling down into dirt.

Luna could feel the blood running down her arm. It was peculiar. She hadn't thought she'd die this way, cut open by a vicious curse, cut down and bleeding on the leaves. She blinked up at the Death Eater she hadn't expected to be there. They were impossible to tell apart with their black robes and silver masks and she'd thought before that it was probably easier to hurt people when you hid yourself away like that; it allowed you to take on the role of monster. It was one reason she refused to disguise herself. If she was going to strike at people she would do it as herself. She wondered who this one was, this would-be monster who stood over her, the wand he'd snatched from her in one fist, his own shaking in another. Did he go home and brag about what he'd done, or wash his hands and try not to look at the robe hanging in his closet.

Given how his hands trembled, she suspected it was the latter.

The blood was coming out faster now and she wondered what would grow here. Sacrifice and blood made for good fertilizer and that little beetle might get fat on her. Fat on her fat. The word play, weak as it was, made her smile so she smiled up at the death who'd stopped his journey just for her even as she got fainter and he got fainter and everything was white. Her last thought before losing consciousness was that she hadn't expected going through the veil to feel quite so much like apparation. Wasn't that interesting?

. . . . . . . . .

The sobbing boy suggested she wasn't dead. Luna wasn't wholly sure what the afterlife would consist of but she thought a dark-haired boy leaning his head on her bed and sobbing seemed unlikely. "May I make you better?" she asked him. Fever dreams could be so very vivid but you could control things in dreams in ways you couldn't in real life. Still, it was best to ask. Not all dream figures wanted to be changed.

He jerked his head up at her words and she saw his eyes were the darkest blue, so dark they were almost black, and that they had bags under them, and that his pale skin looked haggard and unhealthy. "You're conscious," he said. Before she could respond he fumbled for a flask on a table and uncorked it. "Drink this," he said. "I…I healed what I could. That… that One likes to hurt people plus I tend to get cursed a lot in battles so I've gotten pretty good at…but I've never tried to do any of it on someone else before, only me, and you'd lost so much blood and I couldn't get you to swallow."

She stared at him and made no movement to drink what he was pressing to her lips until he said, perhaps considering she might not just trust any old thing handed to her, "It's a blood replenishing potion, nothing more."

She thought about that and decided that it might be very interesting to find out what happened if she drank in this pretend world and so let him tip the medicine into her mouth. She could see the dark robe thrown onto the floor; a silver mask had been tossed onto the same table as a collection of potion flasks, a cup of water, and her wand. "I guess the beetle will go hungry," she said.

He might have thought she was mental - people so often did - but he was a dream figure so he just nodded.

"Tell me," she invited though she could feel herself spinning further and further away which frustrated her. She needed to listen. She needed to hear what he said. She couldn't go just yet.

"There's nothing to tell," he said. "It's the same story we all have, all had, all will have; just change the names to suit the time and side. There's a war. I was told what side I was on and told to go out and kill people. No one asked what I wanted and I can't leave." He shoved his sleeve up and she saw the writhing black snake. "Locked in, locked down, locked away. No choices, no hope. You don't need a seer to tell your future when your father's a Death Eater." He sank to the floor and leaned his back against her bed. "Still haven't quite killed anyone, though. I'm good at finding the opponents who are stronger than me." He let out what sounded like another sob. "They all think I'm brave. Look at Theo, not hiding away at the edge of the fray. A model Death Eater. So aggressive. So violent."

"Theo," she repeated.

"Theodore Nott," he said, not looking at her. "Your attacker and savior, at your service."

The room had begun to wobble a bit but she wasn't sure what she was supposed to make of his message. It didn't matter, however, when he gasped out a sharp cry of pain and grabbed at the Mark on his arm. "Battle's over," he said. "Calling all the outs in free." He doubled over and struggled to stand. "Let's hope it went well or you might not see me for a bit while I recover. Cottage is warded, area right around it is warded, you'll be fine. Just don't go past the sand until you're well enough to apparate home again."

"Home again, home again, jiggety jig," Luna said. "Why not cast a protego on your arm?"

"Doesn't work like that," he said.

She squinted at his arm and at the snake that twisted and turned and looped in and out of the skull mouth and shook her head. Maybe in life it didn't work like that but in dreams you could do anything. She bent down, shocked at how much it hurt to twist her body, and set her hand over the Mark on Theodore Nott's arm. " _Protego_ ," she said and pictured a cage of light that kept the snake trapped and away from its master. _"Protego."_

The room began to spin as she hung over the edge of the mattress, collapsing from her injuries and the effort to create the spell, and thought she'd misunderstood her whole dream. He hadn't come to her to bring a message but because he needed her help. Maybe now that she'd done that task she'd fatten up her little beetle and find out what the voices whispered.

. . . . . . . . . .

"I can't decide if you're brilliant or just have a death wish."

It was the first thing Theo said to her. She'd woken up and found him slumped on the other side of the bed, so soundly asleep he hadn't stirred when she'd gotten up, when she'd found the shower and washed the blood and sweat and dirt off her body, or when she'd made porridge. When she was halfway through her bowl he opened his eyes and immediately squinted against the bright morning sun.

"There's honey," she offered.

"Since I'm the one who stole it away and put it there, I know that," he said. He'd sat up and was watching her as she spooned the cereal into her mouth. "You seem better."

"You're real," Luna said.

"Real enough." He looked down at his arm where the black serpent was still visible but curled up and slumbering as snakes are opt to do on hot summer days. "What did you do?"

"Magic?"

"But it's not possible," he protested. It wasn't supposed to be, after all.

Luna laughed at that and licked her spoon. "We fly on brooms, turn animals into water goblets, and can brew potions that regrow bones overnight and you are caught up in the idea the possible is limited?"

"You're daft," Theo said.

"It's been said," she agreed. "I'm tired of fighting. Harry can call me back for the final battle but I think I want to go to the beach today."

Theodore pulled himself off the bed and walked to the bright window and looked out at the water. "I'm free," he said quietly.

"Now you have to make choices," Luna said. "Heavier chains, I think."

"Still," he said, "at least I'm putting them on myself. It's different." The beach beckoned from beyond the glass. "You have a way to know when it's the end?"

She handed him a bowl of the porridge. "I do," she said.

He took a bite and looked at the space where the waves hit the shore, erasing what had been there and leaving a clean sheet of sand. "That's good," he said. "That's… that's good."


	22. Wishes (Theo-Regulus)

Theodore Nott sometimes really hated Hogwarts. He'd always hated Draco Malfoy's little feud with Harry Potter and now he hated the way his childhood friend swaggered around, bragging about his devotion to a lunatic. He'd tried to tell his childhood friend that the Dark Lord was not quite the bloody thing from the moment the man, if man he was, had come out of that cauldron. "You don't understand," Draco had said, shaking him off in irritation. "You're just jealous."

Jealous was the last thing Theo was. His own father, just as Marked as Draco's, had found the time to pull him aside and, in a conversation he pretended was about girls, say you could make a mistake in your youth, you could think you were untouchable, and then that mistake could follow you forever. Some things, his father said, had no escape clause and even if you had regrets later it didn't matter. You were stuck. "Don't be stuck, Theodore," Thoros Nott had said.

His father knew perfectly well he had less interest in girls than he had in Dark magic. Theo had known what that conversation was really about. "You can trust me to be careful," he'd said.

After another aborted, pointless wasted conversation with Draco that had ended when the fool had flaunted the Mark on his arm and turned away, happier to bask in sycophantic encouragement from Greg and Vincent then listen to an actual friend, Theo found himself stalking through the corridors of the castle. "Why couldn't he have just knocked Pansy up?" he muttered to himself. "One quickie wedding and everyone's happy and no one counts backwards on their fingers or expresses any surprise at how very large and healthy the premature baby is. But, no, he had to go sell his soul instead of just his name." He kicked at a wall. "Idiot."

He didn't even know why he cared anymore. Draco was a lost cause and Theo wasn't usually one to waste his time trying to bail the sea. He just hated seeing his oldest friend drown. He just hated knowing there was no way to spring him from the trap he'd walked into of his own accord. Theo walked past one of Hogwarts endlessly hideous tapestries, this one of a ballet class for trolls, and muttered, "I just wish I could have... I wish I could save someone." He kicked at the wall again and poked a finger against one of the tutu clad trolls. "And since I'm being ridiculous, make that someone cute and gay and interested in actually listening to advice."

The troll was patently uninterested in the grievances of yet another interchangeable Hogwarts student, and Theo turned away only to spot a door he'd never noticed before on the opposite wall. Considering the virtues of a room away from chattering students who cared about exams and gossip and essays when all he wanted was silence, Theo pushed open the door and slipped through it.

The room, like so many at Hogwarts, was filled with the debris of centuries. Two worn, green leather chairs sat in front of a derelict fireplace, and Theo flung his lanky body down into one of them, draping a leg over one side. He had his wand out, and the fireplace scourigfied and lit, before the door opened and another student tromped into the room.

"Who are you?" they demanded in unison.

Theo assessed the newcomer. He had dark hair that hung into his eyes in a way Theo, not a stranger to male vanity about hair, knew was no accident. He had to admit he appreciated the effect; dark eyes peered out from the fringe with lashes that any girl would have envied. Theo immediately pictured the boy casting an upward glance through those lashes while his mouth was busy, and he told his brain to stop with the fantasies.

"You aren't in my House," the boy said, his voice laced with accusation. "Who'd you steal that tie from?"

Theo looked at the boy's own green tie and dated robe. "Is it history dress up day?" he asked. "And I've been in Slytherin since I was eleven. Where do you really belong? Hufflepuff? Gryffindor?"

The boy looked murderously offended. "I think you might be confusing me with my worthless brother," he said. "Sirius."

The only Sirius Theo knew was the lunatic who'd been Harry Potter's now-dead godfather. Being Draco Malfoy's friend, even a friend on the outs, meant you knew too much about all things Potter. "Sirius Black?" he asked, and at the boy's sullen nod he began to laugh. "Nice try," he said, "but there are no Blacks at Hogwarts. Draco's the closest thing to, and he's a Malfoy."

"There's no Draco in the Malfoy family," the boy scoffed. He figured it out a few seconds before Theo did. "What year do you think it is?" he asked.

Theo got very quiet. "1996," he said.

"It's 1978 for me," the boy said. He thrust his hand out. "I'm Regulus. Regulus Black."

"Theo Nott."

The two eyed each other. "This," Theo said at last, "is exactly why this bloody school is such a pain in the arse." Regulus laughed and his face opened into a look of pure delight and Theo knew he wanted nothing more than to see that flash of happiness again. Regulus flopped down into the matching second chair and they began to talk. Regulus resented his brother, who'd fled and left him to bear the burden of his parents' outsized dreams of familial glory. He was witty and dramatic and funny and at a loss for what to do in the face of being the little king. Abdication seemed impossible. Theo felt equally helpless in the face of the nascent war. "Whatever you do," he said glumly after spilling far more about his frustrations with Draco than anyone ever wanted to hear, "don't let someone stick a bloody snake and skull Mark on your arm."

Regulus let out a shaky breath. "They want to," he whispered. "Bella wants me to, and Lucius, and -"

"Don't," Theo said. Theo begged. Oh, Merlin, let this one listen to him. "It's a trap." He didn't know what had happened - what would happen - but he knew there was no Regulus Black in his time. No sooty eyes looking out through black fringe. No insightful mind. No cock-hardening smile.

He wasn't sure he wanted to go back out that door to a world without Regulus Black.

Regulus stared into the lit fire. "I don't know how to escape," he said. "You're right, it's a trap, and I'm caught in it."

Theo thought of the dancing trolls, and how big Nott Manor was, and how his father was very good at not seeing things he didn't wish to know about. "If we walked out together," he said, "whose time do you think we'd go to?"

"I hope yours," Regulus said. "I walked in here wanting some way to get to a time where my parents couldn't force me, well, you know."

"That was your wish?" Theo asked, glancing over at him. It was a sensible wish, but he found himself obscurely disappointed by it.

Regulus held his glance. "And other things," he said.

Theo began to smile. "Would I like these other things?" he asked.

"Maybe," Regulus said. "Want to find out? Before we risk exiting?"

Theo glanced at the door that led who knew when, and then back at the green-tie clad boy whose mouth had begun to turn up into an actual smirk. "Yeah," he said, "I think I do."

He did and he did. They did.

Theodore toasted his father seven years later at his wedding, to a round of delighted laughter, as, 'The man who knew when to embrace poor eyesight.'

 **~ finis ~**


	23. The Triangle (Blaise-Ginny)

"Like I'd touch a filthy little blood traitor like her," Blaise Zabini said. Pansy shrugged, pleased, and the conversation was over, Ginny Weasley with her ginger hair and flashing eyes relegated to the trash heap where she should belong, and where he'd leave her if life were fair. His eyes fell on the tiny black triangle that looked burned into his arm. It wasn't, of course. Soul-mark, rare and special and a sign that you and your supposed beloved belonged together, a thing of glory and magic and the bane of his short life.

When Daphne had spotted the thing way back in second year all the girls in Slytherin had gone on an uncharacteristic research spree and found out more about soul-marks than he'd ever wanted to know. No amount of dissuasion on his part would make them shut up about it. Somewhere there was a girl, they'd told him, their daft eyes shining with romance brought on by too many cheap novels. She was his and he was hers and she had the exact same mark somewhere on her body and as soon as they touched they'd be bonded.

Forever.

Blaise had been very careful not to touch anyone for four years. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in some kind of magical forced marriage - forced _faithful_ marriage - with some random girl. Then he'd seen the Weasley girl pull her hair up into a slovenly pony tail preparing for Quidditch practice and there, at the base of her neck where she'd probably never seen it, was the same black triangle.

He'd gone back to the dorm and thrown up for an hour and then crawled into bed. A blood traitor from a family of paupers and she was his one true love. Merlin, he thought to himself, Merlin fucking _wept_.

Fortunately, it was easy to avoid physical contact with a girl who was both in another House and a year younger than he was. They didn't have classes together. They didn't eat together. He just had to wait until he finished school and then he'd probably never see her again and he'd be fine. He wouldn't be consumed by some passion he hadn't asked for. There would be no perfect little magical bonding to tie him down. Even better, now that he knew he could touch anyone else, he not only could, he did. He mastered the art of hovering just out of reach of whatever girl he fancied and whispering he didn't want to risk it, what if she was 'the one'? He'd ruin her life with just a single brush of his hand.

He'd never had one turn him down. Not a single one. It was almost boring.

Strike the almost, he thought, as yet another pretty, vapid girl fell for the line.

If he started to run fingers through their hair and wish the shade were different, if he started to notice a certain woman was not only beautiful and good at Quidditch, she was brave to the point of foolhardiness, well, he could resist magic. He could stay away from the leader of Hogwart's underground as the world went mad. He, he told himself, was the very last thing she wanted or needed.

That reasoning worked right up until the day he paced, rolling his eyes with assumed boredom, in the dungeons under his own school while all the good people of his world fought with righteous fervor above him. He tousled the heads of crying first and second years and told them not to be silly, they were in the safest place. "No one shooting curses at you," he told one moppet with blonde curls and snot running down her face. "Just take a deep breath and when it's over, they'll let us out, safe and whole."

One more reason to avoid Ginny Weasley, he thought: she'd probably want a huge family and want to make pot roast every night for a brood of kids just as tedious as the ones he comforted while a battle raged overhead. The idea of that kind of domestic prison was revolting.

When they were released, he picked his way through the rubble. He would just check on her, he told himself. He would just make sure she was fine, and then he would take himself off to the continent so she could have a happy life without the Slytherin playboy hanging around like some kind of dead albatross. That was until he heard she'd confronted Draco's crazy aunt Bellatrix. When he heard _that_ he stormed up to her without thinking, grabbed her by the arm and spun her around to face him.

"Are you mental?" he demanded without preface. "That bitch could have killed you!"

She hauled off and slapped him so hard his ears rang.

"What was that for?" he asked in fury as he put his hand to his stinging cheek

She grabbed his wrist and twisted it so the soul-mark showed. "You don't think I'm so stupid I didn't know?" she asked. He tried not to gasp at the way she had him turned around so he was almost bent over. A tiny bit more leverage and she'd break his wrist.

"I'm sorry?" he said, half a question, half an apology. Ginny tossed his hand down and turned to walk away and he grabbed her shoulder. "Why would I have inflicted myself on you?" he said, the words a hiss that were almost lost in the crackle and din of the aftermath of the battle. "Why would someone like you want someone like me?"

"I can't imagine," she said. She sounded livid and he wanted to just burn in her flame until he was nothing but ash. She had soot on her face and blood near her mouth and he couldn't bear not being sure whether it was hers or not. He reached out and used his thumb to wipe at it and felt her tremble against his hand. He didn't flatter himself it was his touch that did it; she was just crashing after the adrenaline rush of the battle. He sighed and pulled her up against him and she let herself sag against him and he felt right in a way he hadn't in years.

"We should find you something to eat," he said. "Maybe some juice. That will help you feel better."

"You've touched me now," she said. "You're stuck." He had her halfway to a table someone had set up when she added, "Arsehole."

"Mmm," he said. "I can leave after I know you're going to be okay if you'd prefer."

"Don't you dare," she said. "You're stuck now."

He glanced down at her and when she looked up her lips curved in a smile that verged on being a smirk. He leaned down, unsure if he'd be welcome and relieved when she pulled his lips to hers and devoured him until he was wholly, utterly, unequivocally hers.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - Something set somewhat in the same soul-mate universe as The Thin White Line_**


	24. When Are We? (Ron-Hermione-Albus D)

**A/N - I was dared to do this on tumblr. It's so bad. Don't read it. Really. I feel sort of gross.**

 **. . . . . . . . . .**

"I don't know if I can take this anymore."

Hermione sat up and rubbed at her shoulder. This time the fall had knocked the wind out of her and it took her longer than usual to get a sense of where she was. Ron lay next to her on the grass and groaned. "Do we even know when we are this time?" he asked.

She pulled out her wand and cast a tempus spell. The date hung in the air and then dissipated and Hermione just flopped back down to the ground. "1903," Ron said. He rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow and poked her. "Nineteen fucking oh three, Hermione."

"If you can think of a way to make it stop, I'd love to hear it," she snapped. He didn't answer, just as she'd known he wouldn't. They'd been bouncing through time for months, the result of a curse they'd tried to dismantle.

Hermione pulled her notebook out of her bag and wrote the date down.

"How long were we in 1952?" she asked him.

"Four days," he said. "Four long, miserable days." She wrote that down as well and squinted at the results. She'd decided there had to be a pattern to the madness and had started tracking everything. Ron had mocked her at first but he'd eventually admitted she seemed to have discovered a few elements they could count on. The further back in time they went, the less time they stayed _and_ the more likely they were to pop into their own time for a few minutes afterward. To the people who'd watched them mangle the curse-breaking it looked as if they flickered away for a moment or two, came back for a few minutes, only to flicker away again. That much they'd figured out. They'd even managed to tell their friends that what looked like moments they themselves experienced as days or weeks. It didn't mean anyone had a solution.

"Looks like a cute village," Hermione said. She'd sat up again and was peering at the small gathering of cottages. "I guess we go and find the local witch and ask for help, as usual."

Ron groaned again and sat up. They'd become facile at explaining they odd time spell they were trapped in. Most witches were intrigued and helpful, though one had declared them demons and summoned a priest, of all things, to exorcise them. They'd had hopes it might work. It hadn't.

He looked at the view and began to laugh. At Hermione's expectant look he said, "I know where we are. My mum has a Christmas postcard of just this scene, only with snow."

Hermione spread her hands and waited for the useful information.

"Godric's Hollow," Ron said.

Hermione let out a pained laugh. "At least it's not Little Whinging," she said. "Seeing Harry at two with that aunt was too weird."

Ron had spent the whole of that stop lobbing petty curses, and one not so petty, at Harry's relatives. Vernon Dursley's inability to father any more children to torment Harry was a direct result of Ron's meddling. Hermione had tried to look disapproving but she'd also left several curses on the garden, dooming the Dursleys to multiple years of rust spots and mold on their plants. "You know," Ron said, "this wouldn't be so bad if you were a guy. It'd be a bit like an extended vacation. The grand tour of time and all. But I'm getting tired of wanking off and would love a good shag."

Hermione picked up a clod of dirt and aimed it at his back. When it stuck she said, "Wouldn't be so bad if you were straight."

"Touche," he said, and they walked into 1903's Godric's Hollow together.

The first cottage they stopped at had a waist-high picket fence around an attractively landscaped garden with a white table and three chairs, a pot of tea, and one young wizard rather desultorily using his wand to yank gnomes out of a spot by a dirigible plum tree and hurl them over the hedge into the field on the other side of the garden.

They'd found their wizard.

"Miserable job, de-gnoming," Ron said.

The man looked up. He had high cheekbones, a lush mouth, and dirty-blond hair that sat in untidy waves along his brow. Hermione kicked Ron when he sucked in his breath. They had no time for that and he needed to control his libido. "It is," the man agreed. "Where are you from?"

"When's the real question," Ron said. "Might we come in?"

The man waved them through the gate, his interest clearly taken by the possibility of time travelers lost in his village, and he poured out more tea for them as they poured out their tale of woe. "It's not likely you can help," Hermione said. "So far no one's been able to. We've gotten a bit of a grasp on the pattern of the timing of when we're bounced around, but that's it. All we're really hoping for is a safe place to stay until we disappear again."

"I think we can do better than that," he said, his eyes twinkling. He introduced himself as "Al" and by the time night had fallen he'd examined her notes, charted out some theories of his own, confessed to having had his heart recently broken by a man with eyes like sin, and had broken out the fire whiskey.

"I wouldn't mind a man with eyes like sin," Ron muttered as he stared into the bottom of his glass. "Or any man. Not that Hermione here isn't great, but - "

"You only prefer men?" their host asked. At Ron's nod his eyes twinkled again as he said, "Limiting, really." He tapped on his notes and seemed lost in thought and suddenly said, "Eureka!"

Ron blinked a few times and looked to Hermione for clarification. She shrugged and waited for Al to explain himself. She'd started to notice the way the light played off the planes of his face and how he licked his lips when he was thinking as though he were tasting the ideas and finding them delightful. She was sure it was the whiskey and how tired she was of being transported from one time to another but she found herself staring at those lips and watching them move instead of listening to the words. He didn't care to be limited, and it had been a long time, and it wasn't as if they'd ever see him again. She slid her foot under the table and brushed it against his calf. He met her eyes and that mouth blossomed into a slow, calm smile. "I think I've found the solution to your problem," he said.

"So quickly?" Ron almost scoffed but he leaned forward, eager to listen.

"I am considered somewhat of a prodigy," the man said, almost apologetically. He explained his idea and Hermione fought to stay focused on the words because they _were_ brilliant. Merlin, this man was _brilliant_ and if his mouth hadn't been temptation enough his mind was devastating. It was a simple spell, joining two other charms together into a unit in a way she had never thought of. It was creative and clever and she bit her lip as she watched him and slid her foot up the length of his leg to rest it in his lap.

"Hermione," Ron turned to her, oblivious to what was happening under the table. "Would this work?"

"I think so," she said, her eyes on the way that one curl half fell over their host's eyes. "I think everything will work just brilliantly."

Things went predictably from there. Ron left his trousers and pants over by the snow globe collection and as they grabbed their things before they were pulled away Hermione found her brassiere by the fireplace.

That lush mouth feasted on them both, and they returned the favor, and if neither Ron nor Hermione were interested in one another, they were happy to get lost in a drunken, sensual haze with their host. It was a glorious encounter, the kind of thing by which one might be tempted to measure all future love. He was brilliant in _all_ ways.

When the tug of the curse began to pull at both of them they had long enough to desperately throw their clothes back on, shoes shoved into Hermione's bag. "Thank you," Hermione said. "Thank you for everything."

"I hope it works," he murmured huskily. "If it does, look me up in your future. Even old, I'd want to see you again."

"Al?" Ron asked, the name a question because it wouldn't be enough to find him.

"Albus Dumbledore," the man said right as the curse whisked them away, back to their own time.

Luna stood at the table, just where she'd been when they'd last been there weeks before, Harry and Draco Malfoy at her side, and Hermione cast the spell Al - _Albus Dumbledore -_ had created over tea and alcohol and she and Ron waited, looking at one another as they waited for the jerk away to another time that didn't come.

"It worked," Ron said, and then he turned away from her and began violently throwing up the whole of the contents of his stomach. Hermione managed to control her urge to join him, though her own gut heaved in sympathy.

"Did that happen every time you changed times?" Luna asked, bright curiosity in her voice. "That would be terrible."

"Terrible," Hermione said faintly. She looked at Ron and he looked at her.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Harry asked.

"No," Ron said. He met Hermione's eyes. "I never, _ever_ want to talk about it."

"Me either," she said. "I need a shower. A very hot, very long shower."

"That bad?" Draco asked. "Really, Granger? I mean, you smell terrible, like you bathed in alcohol and then had sex for about three hours straight - and what is that mark on your neck - but you didn't used to be that squeamish."

Hermione just shuddered and refused to say any more.


	25. Claire's Coffee (Theo-OC)

**A/N - A quick drabble for Claireabellalou, who dreamed of a cleo fic...**

* * *

He'd come into Claire's Coffee every day for three months. At first she'd made him his coffee without thought, then she'd dismissed him as one of those annoying university students. His clothes were always odd, as if he'd grown up wearing other things and now put outfits together using fashion magazines as a guide. Then she'd thought he might be a model; he certainly had the bone structure and come hither eyelashes to make a living having his picture taken, and that would explain the peculiar ensembles. He'd fumbled with money at first, not sure what was worth what, and she'd finally decided he must be foreign despite his posh accent. Maybe he was a boarding school student, someone who'd picked up the cadence from other boys at Eton or some such without ever having to do anything as plebeian as pay for things. Recently, however, he'd handed over the cost of his drink with increasing confidence, and settled into the same chair at the same table and sipped his coffee while watching people. His clothes had gotten less weird, too. It was as if he were learning to be normal.

He was a mystery.

She took the drink from the girl who'd made it and said, "I'll take it over." Her employee gave her a puzzled look because Claire's Coffee didn't offer table service; you waited for your name to be called and came to fetch your custom drink. "I'm curious," she said.

"He's hot enough to be curious about," the girl said and Claire laughed and carried the bowl-like coffee cup over to her most regular customer.

"Theo?" she asked.

He jumped and reached for his hip and she was suddenly afraid he'd have a gun. Shite, she thought, maybe he was a crazy American. He looked almost immediately embarrassed, however, and placed his hand on the table as if to make it clear he was unarmed. "Sorry," he said. "You startled me."

She set the cup down. "Let me make it on the house as an apology," she said.

He smiled at her and she felt herself almost melt. The way his lips tweaked up in half grin that revealed one crooked tooth should be illegal. "I already paid," he said.

"Tomorrow, then," she said.

His smile became somewhat wider. "I can only accept that if you sit with me," he said.

She sank into the chair opposite him and smiled back. "If you want to be seen with someone in a coffee-stained apron," she said.

They sat and exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before she said again, planning to rise and go back to the counter, "Well, I'm sorry I startled you. Let me know - "

"I'm sorry," he said, then added rapidly, "It was a rough few years in my teens. I learned to be afraid all the time, to be alert. It wasn't about you, or this lovely shop. I really am very sorry if I gave you the impression - "

"What happened?" she asked, her plan to get up abandoned and her curiosity so piqued she committed the horrible faux pas of asking a near stranger a personal question.

His face became closed and in the place of the half-smile a look of utterly blank indifference settled across his mouth and eyes. "Nothing important," he said. "All is well now."

Abuse, she thought. Something bad. Something he didn't want to talk about. Something he already regretted having alluded to. What could make a grown man jump and reach for a weapon - because now she was sure that was exactly what that aborted gesture to his hip had been - just at the sound of someone coming up behind him? "I'm sorry," she said, "I shouldn't have - "

"No," he said, cutting her off. "It's really quite all right. Think nothing of it."

His throat bobbed in a compulsive swallow and in that moment he became more than the mysterious, attractive daily customer. Don't do this, she said to herself. But she'd always been the girl who brought home birds with broken wings and nursed them back to health and she already knew she was going to. Plus, there was that smile. "We close at six," she said.

"I know," he said. His eyes traced over her face.

"Take me to dinner?"

"I'm complicated. I have secrets. They aren't all pleasant."

"I'm unpleasant without coffee."

He looked around her small shop with its overabundance of plants and the worn leather seats and the chess table where even now two students sat, their heads down over the pieces. "I guess you have the right business, then," he said.

"Six?" she asked.

"I'll wait," he said. "If that's okay with you."

She nodded and he did, sitting the whole of the afternoon. He pulled a paperback from the pocket of his overcoat and read for a bit, and she would look up at him while she made drinks and dealt with one broken espresso machine, an empty cream container and the woman from down the street with the floral perfume who always had a new reason she should be given a free drink. When she looked over at Theo during the woman's insistence her coffee had been at least a full degree warmer than the legally allowed limit and thus should be complimentary, he caught her eye and smiled and she wondered what that smile would look like when he was a little less dressed and a little more rumpled.

She found out after dinner.

The smile looked good.


	26. Hearts in the Margins (Greg-Luna)

Greg knew he wasn't smart. He didn't even want to be. It seemed like so much work. He'd struggled with a governess who told him not to worry about it when he struggled with reading and maths. She'd touched her forearm meaningfully and told him his father and someone else would make sure he had a place in the world. Greg knew what that meant. He'd traced over the lines of his father's faded Mark since he could walk. He'd coloured in the spaces until it has been a rainbow as his father laughed and ruffled his hair.

"Why are the lines so dull?" he'd asked.

"They won't always be," his father would say. "Some day you'll see."

He'd managed to hide how hard it was to follow the textbooks at Hogwarts and learned to memorize what professors said even as he slouched down in his seat and pretended he wasn't listening, that he didn't care. School was for swots like that know-it-all Granger and smug Malfoy. He didn't need school, and if essays he laboured over came back with more red than black ink, well, he was stupid. That's what happened. He couldn't even remember how to make the letters face the right way half the time.

Sometimes when Malfoy laughed at him he wanted to smash the boy's nose in. He wanted to hit and hit and hit until it didn't hurt anymore. He didn't, though. He'd be special when things changed. He'd be special and powerful, but so would Malfoy. He'd never get out from under Draco Malfoy's thumb so he laughed when he was supposed to laugh and followed the prat around and fought his battles for him.

It would have been nice if Malfoy had written his essays for him in return or at least helped, but that wasn't the way friendship worked, not for stupid, slow Gregory Goyle.

That was what he was thinking as he struggled to make the letters stop wriggling and line up so he could write however many feet he had to do this time on transfiguration. He sat in the library and wrote things down wrong and wondered how pinched Professor McGonagall's tight smile would be when she handed this newest proof of his failures back to him. "If you'd just take a little care, Mr. Goyle," she had said the last time. "Your ideas are fine and you seem to understand the material but your handwriting is atrocious and your spelling unacceptable."

He'd gotten a 'P'. Draco had laughed as he'd waved his own parchment with its 'O' under his nose.

"That not how you spell it."

He looked up into the grey eyes of the notoriously daft Ravenclaw and glared at her.

"Unless you're using a substitution code." She looked suddenly excited by the possibility and, seemingly oblivious to an expression that intimidated even Pansy Parkinson, she pulled a chair up, sat down next to him, and leaned up against his side as she peered over at his essay.

Her hair smelled rather disconcertingly of treacle tart.

"You are," she said in delight. "You're swapping tons of letters." She sat back and looked at him and it was the first time Greg could recall anyone looking at him as if he were clever and interesting and she was a girl. She was a pretty girl with pretty hair and big grey eyes and she was looking at him as if he were something more than Malfoy's big, dumb goon. "Teach it to me," she added. "I love codes."

A streak of self-destructive honesty made him admit, "I'm not. I'm just stupid and I mix things up."

He waited for her to get the same disappointed glaze across her eyes everyone else got when they looked at him but she looked puzzled instead. She tweaked the essay away from him, settled down, and began to read it. After a bit she touched one paragraph and said, "This bit isn't in the books. I read all the transfiguration textbooks to try to get a nargle to turn into a butterfly and this isn't in any of them."

He flushed. "I didn't read the book," he mumbled. "McGonagall just talked about that in class." He didn't ask what a nargle was. If you didn't ask questions people didn't laugh as much.

She just nodded and went back to reading as much as he'd gotten done. Then she set it down. "Would you like me to write out a fair copy?" she asked. "I'll use the boring normative spellings and won't even add hearts to the heads of the letters that like them even though you could use hearts."

Greg was about to say no but she'd already started copying over what he'd written. She made him dictate the end, then blew on the ink, rolled the parchment up, and handed it to him. As he mumbled thanks he looked down at her bare feet and blurted out, "Where are your shoes?"

"Oh, people take things that aren't theirs," she said. "They come back, though."

"Aren't you angry?" Greg asked her.

She smiled at him. "Things sometimes come back better than they left." Then she was gone.

He got an 'E' on the essay.

He started to watch her, a dirty sprite floating through derisive laughter. At first he though she didn't notice it. Then he realized she didn't care. When Malfoy laughed at him for misreading the Potions instructions – Snape rarely explained lessons, he just wrote recipes on the board and expected you to follow – he cared a little less than he had before. If a tiny girl younger than he was could ignore people who didn't appreciate her, maybe he could too.

She seemed to find him and casually copied over his essays, never adding hearts, never mentioning that his spelling was bad. When he told her the letters danced, she squinted at her magazine and said, "Mine never do. You're lucky."

The letters danced a lot when he took his O.W.L.s and he failed all of them. "Oh, tests" she said when he told her. "The Ministry just uses those scores to find out who can be subverted to their agenda. There's not a single question on them about things that matter." He watched her mouth as she talked about how nothing worth knowing fit on an examination anyway. She had an ink spot at the side of her bottom lip where she'd mistaken a regular quill for a candy one and tried to suck on it.

When things got bad and his father's Mark became a dark nightmare rather than a child's coloring sheet, Greg watched people. He was stupid, though, he'd begun to think, maybe not quite as stupid as he'd always believed, but he could see when things went wrong. He could tell when things were out of place. He took a certain malicious pleasure in watching Malfoy's fall from grace - years of kowtowing to the boy's bullying malice ensured that – but he could see his own father was more frightened than pleased with events and the resurrected Dark Lord. He could see the members of this order he'd been raised to look forward to joining were not right in the head. He could see a certain blonde sprite was in danger. He could see she wouldn't listen to him.

He held her tiny hands tightly in his before she left for Christmas that year of the war. "Be careful," he said.

"I'll come back," she said.

When she did it wasn't the way he expected. It wasn't on a train with students returning from holiday. It was to fight in a battle. He found her after, blood on her face and dirt on her jumper. Some hysterical part of his brain took over and he heard himself say not that he was grateful she'd survived but, "At least you have shoes on." He'd seen a friend burned alive. He'd smelt blood boiling away. All he could do was state stupid, obvious things. All he could do was wait for her to hate him, the boy on the wrong side. So stupid. So, so stupid.

She glanced down at her feet.

He said, "I missed you."

She did that thing where she heard what people didn't say and nodded. "I missed you, too," she said. "Even though you don't put hearts in your margins and you should."

"You'll have to take care of that," he said. "I'm not good at writing."

She put her hand in his and squeezed his fingers. "You're better than you think you are," she said.


	27. As Time Goes By (Luna-Pansy)

**Battle of Hogwarts + 1 day**

Pansy hated her life. She hated Hogwarts, and she hated Harry Potter, and she hated Draco Malfoy, and she hated her parents, and she hated the mercifully-dead, crazy Dark Lord, and she hated everything and everyone. She hated that there was blood under her fingernails she'd first gotten when she hysterically turned bodies over looking for Draco, who'd gone off with his parents and not bothered to tell anyone, meaning her, that he was fine. She hated that no one would speak to her because she'd said the unthinkable and tried to turn over Potter. She hated herself.

She'd spent the day stomping around Hogwarts cleaning up the things bodies leave behind when they lie on the ground leaking out blood and ooze and bits of things she'd rather have not known about. She knew about them now. She had them under her fingernails now.

She pushed some of her lank, dirty hair out of her eyes, cursed when it fell back, and prepared to return to making herself _useful_. She would prove she was more than what people thought, and if that meant scrubbing up horrible things while everyone else hugged their families and pretended they didn't see her, didn't see any of her ilk, than fine.

Her ilk steered clear of her too, however, lest being anathema was contagious.

The bucket sloshed some of its disgusting water out onto the floor when she went to pick it up and move it to the next spot and she swore again.

"Let me help you."

Pansy looked up and scowled at the daft Ravenclaw who'd tied her pretty blonde hair back into some kind of grim braid. "I don't need it," she said. "Go help one of your friends."

Luna Lovegood picked the bucket up anyway and carried it away and Pansy trailed after her. "I was using that," she said helplessly as Luna dumped the contents out onto the dirt and then tucked the bucket away next to a felled column.

"You're tired," Luna said. "Go home. The dead will still be here. I mean, they'd won't be, of course. Not really. Not in the ways that matter. Not even their bodies, I suppose. But their intestines will."

Pansy looked at all the people who didn't see her anyway, wouldn't see her, and gave up. "Fine," she said. "I'm gone."

 **Battle of Hogwarts + 10 days**

The thing about fire whiskey, Pansy thought, was that it wasn't actually on fire. This seemed like a remarkably profound observation and she wished she had someone to share it with, but, since she didn't, she just downed the glass of the non-flaming whiskey and bit her lip as she regarded the way the light hit the tumbler. It flickered and made pretty patterns on the table at the pub where no one saw her. Even the barmaid managed to take her order and bring her her drink while letting her eyes glide over her.

"Maybe the light is the fire," she said out loud.

She waved for another drink without looking up and when a hand put it in front of her she was going to mutter thanks until the body attached to the hand sat down and Luna Lovegood said, "Hi."

"Oh," Pansy said. "It's you."

"I think so," Luna agreed. "Though I haven't looked in a mirror lately, so I might have changed."

Pansy let her eyes trace along the woman. Same blonde hair as always, now with what looked like wilted weeds tucked into it, same grey eyes, same gentle smile. "You're you," she said. She raised her glass. "To the prettiest Ravenclaw."

Luna dimpled at her. "I didn't know you thought I was pretty," she said.

Pansy hated when pretty girls pretended not to be. She'd heard the way Potter and his crew of popular misfits called her ugly and the closest thing she'd ever had to a boyfriend hadn't been able to pay attention to her at the one dance he'd taken her to; three years had passed and she still hadn't forgiven him for ignoring her to gape at Granger all night. She'd spent a lot of time looking in the mirror after than when no one was around and she'd come to the conclusion he was right. Potter was right. Granger was right. She was plain and had an ugly nose and it was no wonder that no matter how she'd tried, she hadn't been able to get Draco to ever really care about her. Not pretty enough for him, she supposed.

"You're all right," she said now, sourly, to Luna. "If you like pale girls with radishes in their hair."

"It's carrot tops," Luna said. "Do you?"

"Do I what?" Pansy demanded. She knew she'd had a lot to drink, and she knew Luna had a reputation for not making sense, but she was having more trouble following the woman than she would have expected, even with all that.

"Like pale girls with carrots in their hair?"

Pansy had lifted her glass halfway to her mouth when she realized Luna said what sounded like a proposition. If Greg Goyle had said that to her, it would have been a proposition. He would have followed it with a suggestion they go snog behind the mermaid statue. Pansy wasn't sure what it meant from Luna.

"You're nice enough, I guess," Pansy said, setting the glass back down.

"Nice enough to go home with?" Luna asked.

Pansy blinked at her a few times. "I need a sobriety potion," she said. There was no way she could figure out what might be happening if she were drunk.

Luna nodded. "Consent is very important," she said.

 **Battle of Hogwarts + 100 days**

"You are just so beautiful," Luna said. She poked her toe at Pansy. "You have the cutest nose."

Pansy made a grouchy sound and rolled onto her stomach. Luna liked mornings. She rose with the dawn and sometimes, horror of horrors, she sang. She painted pictures she claimed she needed the early light for her to properly see, and she made elaborate breakfasts of baked goods that usually, though not always, included all the ingredients the recipe called for.

"You have to stop disagreeing with me," Luna said. "It's rude."

"You're delusional," Pansy said, the words muffled by her pillow.. "Crazy, delusional - "

"Pretty," Luna said. "You think I'm pretty."

Pansy rolled back onto the side and squinted at the woman whose flat she'd never quite left. "Yes," she said. "I think you're pretty."

"I know," Luna said, as pleased with herself as a cat in the sun. "It's what you called me the night you hit on me."

Pansy sat up at that blatant rewrite of their history. "You hit on me," she said, taking the muffin Luna handed her. "I didn't hit on you."

"You called me pretty," Luna said. From her perspective, that clearly meant the argument was over and Pansy had already learned not to argue when Luna got that tone. Whenever she tried, they ended up going round in circles that got more and more complex until she'd lost the whole string of her thoughts and Luna laughed at her.

Life lesson: don't date a Ravenclaw, Pansy thought. She took a bite out of the muffin. Luna had remembered the sugar this time, and added something new. "Almond extract?" Pansy asked.

Luna smiled in that way she had where her mouth curled up in slow motion, then her eyes squinted, finally her nose wrinkled up, and Pansy's heart did that little skipping thing she'd felt more and more frequently lately. "And I stirred it under the moon," she said. "It's waning gibbous."

Pansy decided it was best to not ask what that had to do with baking. "Well, it worked," she said. "Thanks, moon."

"You're welcome, flower," Luna said.

 **Battle of Hogwarts + 1,000 days**

"You have to wear robes," Pansy said. Her voice took on a certain hysteria when Luna didn't react and just kept brushing her hair. "Luna, my parents will be there. I don't even get along with them half the time and they're throwing this party and… you can't just be naked."

"It's traditional," Luna said. "Three hundred years ago, all witches were married naked."

"I don't care," Pansy said. "Luna, please, they've rented this giant garden place and it's their way of saying they approve, all your friends will be there. Draco, who passes for my friend, will be there. I don't care what people did before they had proper robes and proper shops and you can stay naked the whole honeymoon, I don't care, but you have to wear robes to the wedding."

Luna smiled into the mirror and Pansy swore because Luna knew – _knew_ – that she melted whenever Luna's nose crinkled up that way. "My pretty, pretty Luna," she said desperately, "Please. I love you. I want to love this day too, and that's going to be very, very hard if I have to worry about you getting sunburned the whole time."

Luna said, "Do you look nice in your robes?"

Pansy pictured herself in the white dress, fitted to her waist and flaring out like the biggest princess ball gown ever created with layers of ruffled skirts. It was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was the girliest wedding robe anyone had ever seen. She loved it so much. 'I do," she said. "I look beautiful."

Luna turned to grab Pansy's hands. "Good," she said. "That's good."

"You only love me for my looks," Pansy said with an affected sniff.

"Mmm," Luna said. She kissed Pansy's fingertips. "It helps you like my cooking."

"You'e an excellent cook," Pansy said.

"I sometimes forget the sugar," Luna said.

Pansy shrugged. "Sugar's bad for you," she said. "You going to wear the robes?"

Luna smiled and Pansy opened her mouth to argue again until Luna said, "If it will make you happy," she said. "I'll wear the robes."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - A birthday drabble for the-witch-of-the-forest, one of my amazing beta readers on Pygmalion!**


	28. Fun (dark Blaise-Luna)

Blaise finishing combing out his daughter's hair, neatly parted it down the middle, and began the daily task of tying it back into neat braids. His wife didn't always notice things like messy hair, or whether the girl had shoes on, or whether she'd wandered off with a theoretically deadly snake wrapped around her little wrist. Luna, Merlin love her, preferred to err on the side of letting the child develop her own path, which would have been fine if that path didn't seem to always involve bare feet, serpents, and messy hair.

One of his minions had joked once about what kind of Dark Lord did his daughter's hair. Before Blaise could express his opinion on that insubordination, Luna had fixed her large grey eyes on the man as she severed his testicles. "You don't seem like you'd be a good father," she'd said. It had taken Blaise a moment to realize what she'd done - he encouraged his men to wear trousers so it wasn't immediately obvious - but then he'd stood and laughed as the man bled to death from the wound.

Luna had frowned at him. "He doesn't," she'd said.

Blaise wandlessly and silently summoned a hair-tie from where it had fallen under a couch and fastened it at the bottom of one braid. "How do these things always disappear?" he asked.

"Nargles."

He looked up and smiled at the blonde vision leaning against the doorframe. She'd been out gathering moon-phase sensitive herbs all night, and her muddy feet bore witness to her preference for feeling the earth as she worked. "A good haul?" he asked her.

"Mmm," she said. "It's a good year for mistletoe but blight got most of the hemlock."

Blaise finished the second braid, tied it off, and sent the child off to her governess with instructions to listen because she wouldn't learn Dark curses on her own. "Are you going to get some rest?" he asked after the girl had skipped off.

Luna shrugged. "Things need to be dried properly," she said. "If you don't sing to them as you hang them, they aren't as potent."

Blaise just nodded. Fifteen years of marriage and he'd learned long ago that Luna might sound daft but she was rarely wrong. She'd been instrumental in bringing him to power in the chaos after the Battle of Hogwarts. With Voldemort dead, the Order decimated, and the Ministry rubble, the power vacuum had been almost irresistible. She'd found him on the edge of the battlefield, running his wand between his fingers, and asked what he was thinking about. He'd expected to shock her when he'd said, the words soft, "That the world is ripe for the plucking."

Instead she'd tipped her head to the side and he'd looked into eyes so much more clear-sighted than he'd assumed, and said, "There is no bad but thinking makes it so."

"I think I would be very bad indeed," he'd said.

She'd reached a hand out to touch his face and he'd noted, in the way odd details become very clear at pivotal moments in one's life, that she had blood under them and didn't seem to care. "I think you should go for it," she'd said. "Otherwise Harry will and I think he would not like that." She'd paused and looked out at the rubble where Harry huddled with that blood traitor friend of his and the awful Granger girl. "Or be very good at it."

He'd taken her hand and kissed it. "Join me?" he'd asked. He hadn't been serious. She was an odd girl, but she'd been one of the virtuous heroes.

"And together we'll rule the universe?" she'd asked, and it had been clear she was quoting something but he had no idea what.

"Well, yes," he'd said. That was, after all, the idea.

"I think that would be fun," she'd said, and somehow she'd ended up married to him in a naked ceremony under a new moon, and somehow she'd ended up giving him an heir who had him wrapped more firmly around her finger than even her mother, and somehow she'd become a Dark witch that made the masses tremble.

"They shouldn't have taken my shoes," she'd said when he asked her why.

"You don't like shoes," he'd said, perplexed by that reasoning.

"So?"

"Still having fun?" he asked her now as he dropped a kiss on the top of her head and inhaled the wild scent of the outdoors still clinging to her.

"Oh, yes," she said. She tipped her chin up to kiss him. "Being queen is more fun than even brownies in bed with milk for breakfast."

Blaise reached a hand up to run his fingers through her tangled hair. "Would the queen like brownies in bed?" he asked as he nibbled at the edge of her lips. "Because that could be arranged."

She shook her head. "Can't," she said rather sadly. "I have to sing to the mistletoe."

He nodded and stepped back. He had a meeting with the head of the Muggle Enforcement Division to make, though he'd have postponed it for her. Some of the masses were rebelling again and needed to be put firmly back into their subordinate place. He'd wiped out most of the magic-less of Britain with a Muggle-specific plague, but every now and again the survivors got ideas above their station. Perhaps this time a round of public burnings at the stake would remind them they were powerless against witches and wizards.

He kissed Luna one last time. "Love you, darling," he said before she skipped off and he went down to meet with Percy Weasley and figure out a solution to the current Muggle problem.


	29. Caesura (Lucissa)

Lucius rubbed his forehead. He'd escaped the party of the century, orchestrated as a political and social coup by the bride's terrifying, and tedious, mother and though he knew he'd have to go back out and mingle he needed a few minutes to just breathe. He could see her, the old witch, circulating through the guests in her black robes with a hat so pointed it had to be starched, a glass of whiskey in her hand that elves had been diligent about keeping filled. He wondered how she could even stay upright by now, but this was her triumph and she clearly intended to enjoy every moment of it.

After the way her eldest had run off with someone utter unsuitable, she ought to be grateful this day had happened at all. His father had wanted to call it off. "He'd be your brother-in-law," Abraxas had said with disgust. "What if your wife wanted to have her sister over? Have them _both_ over?"

Lucius hadn't deigned to answer that and his father had dropped the complaint. The one Black sister was unspeakable, the second teetered on being stark, raving mad, but his was perfection. That perfection came up behind him now and rested her cheek against his shoulder. "Enduring?" Narcissa asked.

"I just needed a moment," he said. He inhaled the scent of gardenias and honey that clung to her skin and pictured lying her down in a bed of the first and pouring the second over her. At least a hundred buttons wound up her back holding her robes on, and probably a thousand pins kept her hair piled up with disarming artlessness. "Are you enjoying yourself?"

"The bride is supposed to," she said.

"The mother of the bride certainly is," Lucius said. Druella continued to work the room and glory in her success in landing any husband for girls all tainted by the one sister's mistake. He knew the Blacks considered the Malfoys new money, upstarts, and all that, but they didn't have the social cachet to complain any longer, or hold out for someone more to their liking. It almost made him grateful to Narcissa's sister. He turned so he could tuck his bride into his arm. "But what I care about is you and that was a bit of an evasive answer."

Narcissa smiled at him and though it was mostly her practiced social mask he could see a hint of the real woman underneath. "I'll be happier when they go," she said. "I don't enjoy my parents' company."

"Nor do I," he admitted. "I hope you don't plan to have them over often."

Her smile grew a bit more feral. "I have listened to so many lectures on how a wife's sole duty is pleasing her husband. I'd be an inattentive daughter if I didn't devote myself wholly to that task for the next few years."

Lucius tightened the arm shielding her. He knew the Blacks liked to punctuate lectures with slaps. He'd heard the sound of palm against cheek outside the parlor at their townhouse, had seen Narcissa blink away tears she was too well bred to admit to as she took his hands in hers and said she was pleased to see him. Her voice that day had been so light it floated out to the ears waiting in the corridor. "I'd hate for you to be inattentive," was all he said now.

"And an heir, of course," she said. "A son."

"I look forward to that," Lucius said, his mind returning to the way she smelled of honey. Perhaps that was something she used in her hair.

"I as well," Narcissa said, and his breath caught and his heart lurched and everything in him stood to sharp attention. That wasn't something he'd expected her to say. The party, already interminable, now stretched ahead as an unbearable, sisyphean task. Druella's laughter was as a boulder rolling down the hill to crush his feet under its weight.

Narcissa flinched a little at the sound of that laughter, then squared her shoulders. "Back into the fray," she said before she stepped away from him and prepared to go back to accepting compliments on her marriage delivered with sly digs that she was so fortunate after _the incident_ to find a husband at all.

"Narcissa," Lucius said. She turned and looked back at him. "Thank you."

"For what?" she asked. For a moment genuine confusion filled her eyes.

"Marrying me," he said. She smiled at that before she walked off with her graceful step, her dress swirling around her feet. He thought there might be a tiny lilt in her movements that hadn't been there before. He watched her mingle for a full minute before he also returned to the party where he smiled at people he loathed and shook hands with people he despised, all while waiting for everyone to leave, to go, to disappear back into their own, pathetic lives so he could finally love his wife.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Happy birthday, disillusionist9.**


	30. The Heaviest Chains (Tombrax)

Tom stood at the window and ran the knife over his fingers. The blade, as sharp as magic and hate could make it, left welling red in its wake for only a moment. Then immortality took over and the wounds healed.

"My Lord?" Abraxas Malfoy, all obsequience, hovered in the doorway behind him. Tom wondered, sometimes, if the man ever fantasized about chopping him into so many pieces he couldn't recover. Did he realize if he kept a heart pounding away, attached to a body continually decimated, he'd free himself?

Probably not. Abraxas wasn't the most sophisticated thinker. Or, perhaps, he just wasn't cruel enough to conceive of such a vicious solution. More likely, he simply didn't want to be liberated. The heaviest chains are the ones we crave. Locks we put on ourselves are unpickable.

"Blessed Samhain," Tom said. Abraxas made the polite sound that meant he didn't follow. "Halloween," Tom said. "Happy Halloween."

"Quite," Abraxas said, relieved. "Candy and hobgoblins and all. Was that why you summoned me, my Lord?"

Tom turned, knife still in hand. Abraxas did well, keeping his face pleasantly inquisitive and his eyes away from the silver glinting in his master's hands. A year ago he'd have stared at the blade even as his trousers tented and his throat bobbed. Two years ago, he'd have already had tears burning in his eyes. "Is that why you wished to be summoned?" Tom asked. "To share a quick glass of whiskey and a handful of children's sweets?"

He was sure that was what Thoros was doing. Licorice whips and whiskey, and probably a Muggle girl who'd go home with her pockets lined with gold, unsure whether she'd fallen in with fairies on this, the night of the thinnest veil, unsure how she'd gotten the bruises on her thighs and neck. She'd have enjoyed every minute she wouldn't remember.

The holes in her memory would haunt her far more than knowledge she'd laughed with a handsome man who'd taught her things she'd liked. She'd probably live in fear of what hadn't even happened for the rest of her sad, Muggle days. It was one of the things Tom liked best about Thoros: the delicate touch of his sadism.

"I am yours to command, my Lord," Abraxas said. "Do you wish me to pour you a drink?"

"You wish me inebriated?" Tom asked.

Abraxas went paler than usual at that, his white skin becoming downright ghostly. When Tom let his control off the leash, even a little, the results could take weeks for even a skilled Healer to correct.

Not that Abraxas hadn't wallowed in every moment of it.

"If that is what you desire," he said.

The idea was tempting. Seeing this pureblooded scion bleed under his hands brought Tom a vicious pleasure that rivaled the day he'd murdered his first, and after a glass of the absurdly expensive whiskey Abraxas kept in the cabinet, he'd be primed to cut deeper, push harder, dig further to find what it was that made that blood so very, very pure and thus so much better than his, tainted by his father, damned by his mother. Sometimes, with Abraxas' blood on him, he felt something almost like love.

Hate and love were very similar, after all.

And desire, too.

Still, Halloween always made him uneasy. He wasn't sure why. It was the day he caught glimpses of black dogs out of the corner of his eye, and if he pulled a card from a fortune telling deck it would be death or the fool. Every time. Every year. It wasn't a good day to let his edge slip away into a glass.

"I think not," he said.

Abraxas looked relieved and disappointed. "Shall I go?" he asked.

Tom smiled then, and pushed the tip of his knife into the fleshy tip of one thumb. It fascinated him how it could still hurt even when he knew the wound would heal in moments. Abraxas lost his battle of control and let his eyes rest on the knife and the blood. "I think you need to stay," Tom said. "But if you want to preserve that shirt, I suggest you take it off."

Abraxas' hands shook as he undid one mother-of-pearl button at a time and set the shirt aside, on an armchair with a seat his grandmother had embroidered. The tiny black thread-crows looked up and laughed as he draped the spotless linen over them. He knelt, then, his hands clasped behind his neck, his knees sinking into the thick carpet. "Please," he whispered.

Tom Riddle bound his followers by giving them what they were ashamed to want. He did that now, on this sacred night, cut, after cut, after cut. Happy Halloween.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Written for SpookyScaryDulceWeen on tumblr, 2016**


	31. The Exception (Harry-Pansy)

"You are my exception."

Pansy stopped, the drink halfway to her mouth, and looked at Harry Potter. He sounded sincere. He sounded irritatingly, maddeningly, outrageously sincere, and she wondered if he even knew what an ass he was.

"I mean," he went on, "the whole lot of you are treacherous. Snakes, all of you. Can't be trusted."

He spoke with the careful articulation of the very pissed and she could tell the drink in front of him wasn't his first. It probably wasn't even his seventh. In wine, truth, she supposed, but she didn't want to hear this particular set of truths.

"Oh," was all she said. She hoped he'd take the hint and go away. The night before had been a dreadful mistake borne of lust and whiskey and the self-destructive urge to not be the outcast for once. If she'd fucked the hero of the whole world, alcohol had whispered to her, she'd be redeemed.

She should have known better than to listen to the whispers of the bottle. There was no redemption for her, only endless payments on the debt she'd incurred as a terrified child.

"But you're different," Harry said. "You're not like the rest of Slytherin." He seemed very proud of himself for coming to this conclusion. "You're my exception."

This payment, however, felt too high and she stared down at the golden lure in the bottom of her own glass. "You're wrong, Potter," she said. "I'm just like the rest of them." Then she got up and walked away.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - for acrimsonleather**

 **If you like Hansy, I recommend Touch by turbulenthandholding, linked out of my favorites.**


	32. Seven Rare Pair Shorts

**Tom/Harry**

"Does it look like I judge you?" he asked.

Harry snorted at that. Tom could manage to make the most absurd ideas sound good, and compel almost any of his asinine lackeys to do horrible things to try to win his approval, and he judged all of it and all of them. Sitting in judgement was what Tom did; it was something that happened when a man fancied himself as a god.

"I'm quite sure you do," Harry said, one naked leg hanging off their bed. "I just don't really care what you think."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Ron/Pansy**

The were drowning, suffocating with air their lungs. Their blood pounded. All he could hear was the raging of his heart as it pushed life into him, as it drained sense from him, as it made him want. And he wanted Pansy, heretical, hateful Pansy who'd tried to save herself at the expense of the hero of the tale. Oh, endless, immortal gods, how he wanted her. He would smother in his own need and his only consolation was she would go down with him.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Marcus Flint / Oliver Wood**

Like Quidditch, love was just another game they played. Oliver wondered sometimes how you could know if you were winning. How did you even keep score? Did you count the number of orgasms you pulled from the other? Whispered confessions of love? He knew the moment when he lost though; the sight of the snake on Marcus' arm made that more than clear.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Sirius/Remus**

Remus was ready to let everyone know Sirius was his. He'd practiced the words in the shower, speech muffled by the water, and he'd mouthed them at himself in the mirror. The only problem was it wasn't true. Sirius remained as oblivious to his stares and fumbles as he was to the girls who trailed after him wherever he went.

Sometimes it seemed as though Sirius thought he didn't deserve love from anyone.

Remus looked across the room at the man who'd learned to turn into a dog just to keep him company at the full moon and wished things were as easy for people as they were for canines.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Hermione/George**

Hermione glared at George, knowing full well he knew what he was doing. The innocent look had stopped fooling her years ago, long before she'd moved into his flat above the joke shop because neither of them could bear to be alone, long before she'd swept up the shards of all the broken mirrors. Long before, even, they'd wound up in the same bed. He flashed it at her all the same and she sighed. "Just tell me no one will get hurt this time?" she said, turning the words into a question, or maybe a plea.

"Have I ever hurt anyone?" he asked, fiddling with the last adjustments on the Ministry Detection Device.

She didn't bother to answer that.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Blaise/Hermione**

She was going to speak whether he liked it or not. She was tired of the way he ignored her scars, the way he pretended not to see the traces of lightning running up her arms from a stray curse. "I'm not ashamed of them," she said without introduction. He'd know what she was talking about. She knew the marks made her disfigured in the eyes of people who saw her in the streets. She'd seen witches turn away, too polite to stare. She'd heard men whisper she'd be pretty if it weren't for… but she was a hero, they'd say quickly, as if embarrassed by their own feelings.

The war had left marks on all of them. Blaise too, she knew. He was just lucky enough, or perhaps unlucky enough, that his scars were on his soul and not his skin.

"You should hate me," he said. "I was on the side that did that to you."

"You were locked away," she said. She set a hand on his shoulder and he leaned into the touch, then pressed his lips to the beginning of one of the lines of scar tissue in what she knew was a silent apology and, perhaps, the start of something new. "You need to forgive yourself," she said.

"How?" he whispered.

She wished she knew the answer.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Tom/Hermione**

"You're not the only one who can deceive people."

Hermione sounded like a self-satisfied cat might sound if it had not only learned English but decided to bother communicating in it. She had one leg thrown over the arm of the ridiculously overwrought chair that Narcissa Malfoy considered decorative and was swinging her foot to and fro. Tom thought it looked a bit like a twitching tail.

"Oh?" he asked her. "What have you done?"

She tossed the _Prophet_ at him and he snatched it from the air before the pages could flutter all over the floor. The cover photograph showed Hermione looking almost as pleased with herself as she did now, waving at the crowd. He read the headline and began to laugh. _War Heroine Helps Convict Tom Riddle, World Safer._

"I spend two weeks in France," he said, "and come back to find myself in jail. What do you plan to do while I'll off in Germany next month?"

She just shrugged.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - for perfect-outlander, purqutory, ff-sunset-oasis, skywolflady, velvetcovered-brick, thevisualaftermath, and theoriginalmotionjunkie as part of a game on tumblr_**


	33. Seven More Rare Pair Shorts

**Pansy/Tom Riddle**

Pansy held him at wandpoint, a grin on her face - the kind she knew Tom hated most. He reached back, his hands twitching as they tried to summon his own, much beloved, wand.

"Looking for this?" she asked, and tossed the broken halves down. His eyes darkened, and she remembered when they'd done that in lust, and maybe even love. It had been tricky, seducing such a renowned legilimens without ever letting him know her true intent, but she'd watched Draco Malfoy, her best friend, crumble at the hands of this man and she'd played a long game. Revenge was best served after a long, careful plan. The temperature was irrelevant.

"Pansy," Tom said, "my love." His mouth twisted the endearment into mockery and she tipped her head, acknowledging the near compliment. He smiled at her but before she could savor the taste of the moment any longer he added, "You have forgotten one thing, my sweetest one."

Her wand flew out of her fingers and she grasped for it as it skittered through the air to his hand. "I am rather good at wandless magic," he said and for the first time since she'd traveled back through time she was afraid.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Ginny/Draco**

Ginny's hands trembled slightly as she leaned in, the firewhiskey giving her the courage to press her lips to his. Draco sucked in his breath at the touch and she briefly thought she'd been too bold. It wasn't a thought she had often but Draco made her nervous as few others did. He made butterflies stir in her stomach and her heart race and her palms sweat. She wasn't sure if it was the way his grey eyes mocked everyone, including himself, or how his very posture reeked of money. Whatever it was, he'd been first untouchable, then the enemy, and she'd never approached him. Tonight, however, he'd been just a solitary young man who'd left his own party to stand in the shadows in the alley behind his flat and look up at the dingy sky.

Tonight he'd seemed like someone she could kiss.

He froze at first when she did, then inhaled, and then pulled away. "Someone dare you to do that?" he asked. "I don't appreciate being the butt of a truth or dare game, Weasley."

"What?" she asked, first confused and then offended. "I don't know what you all did in Slytherin, but I - "

"Please," he said. "Spare me the tedious defense of your innocence and just tell me who put you up to it. Theo? He'd think that was funny. Blaise?"

Ginny looked at him. She wasn't thinking quite straight because of all the whiskey, but something was going on here that she wasn't following. Draco had never struck her at the type to get offended or hurt that a pretty girl kissed him and yet his eyes glittered in a way that hinted at tears in the corners. Maybe he hadn't been the wild party boy rumors liked to paint him, but his vanity alone would have made her think he'd have been happy to enjoy a quick snog even if he never planned to speak to her again. Why did he look like he was about to cry?

"I just," she stumbled. "You were out here alone, and I thought -." She stopped and rubbed at her face, feeling suddenly humiliated. Whatever was going on, he didn't want her. She wished she'd never come outside. Rejection always stung, but it hurt worse at the hands of this boy. "I can see you'd rather not have anything to do with me. Weasley, huh? Still too poor, still beneath you?"

"No," the word burst out of him before he collected himself. "Tell Theo that wasn't nice when you go back in. Not to you or to me."

"Why would I tell Theo anything?" she asked. She barely knew Theodore Nott and he hadn't said one word to her all night.

"Because we both know he sent you out here," Draco said bitterly. "He knows I've had a... a thing for you since that last year with the Carrows, and..." He trailed off and looked at her. "He didn't send you out," he said. The words were flat as if he couldn't believe it.

She lifted her hand and touched his cheek, a sudden mischievous smile lighting her face. "You have a thing for me?" she asked.

This encounter had just gotten much better.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Regulus/Hermione**

Hermione should have known it was impossible for him to behave at a time like this. Most of the time Regulus maintained the facade of the perfect aristocrat. He could devastate a pretender with a single tilt of his head. He could eviscerate someone he considered an inferior with a single word. He might have thrown off the prejudices of his family with one shrug of his well-bred shoulders, but he'd never lost the mannerisms of old money or the sense of his own, innate superiority.

That all crumbled whenever they saw Sirius. No time travel, no miraculous rescue, nothing could stop the brothers from fighting with the passion of two people who wanted to love one another but didn't know how.

She and Remus looked at one another and Remus gave her a slight, apologetic grimace. So much for the idea of a peaceful dinner. She held out her wine glass and he filled it as Regulus' volume hiked up another notch and Sirius drawled that he sounded just like mummy when he yelled that way.

It was good wine, at least. She planned to drink a lot of it.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Theo/Hermione**

"I'm not listening."

She had her arms crossed and was glaring at him, but she'd also marked the page of her book and set it aside, so he suspected she really would listen. He'd deserve it if she didn't. He'd disappeared after the Battle of Hogwarts, bare arms no protection against a Ministry gone mad with revenge. It had seemed wisest to go to a bolt hole on the continent before he ended up tossed in Azkaban with so many of his peers, stained by his father's actions as if the sins of the fathers should be borne by the sons.

It was ironic, really, that after a war where everyone had shouted from every rooftop that blood didn't matter, it did. You were blessed, or doomed, by your parents. They lauded Potter as a hero, "Just like his parents, rest their souls." They condemned Draco as a monster with, "What would you expect from a Malfoy?" Hermione had mostly escaped that because no one knew what her great-grandparents had said and done. There were bad things about being Muggle-born, surely enough, but it wasn't all a curse. He'd envied her that sometimes. She flew or failed by her own merits.

"I still love you?" he said, the words half a question as if he could buy his way back into graces he didn't deserve via honesty. The way her mouth trembled and her eyes softened suggested he'd taken the right approach.

"Damn it, Theo," she said. "It's been two years."

Before he could offer an explanation, or excuse, she'd flung herself into his arms and he held on, home at last.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Susan/Theo**

Everyone had thought Theo had joined the Death Eaters, or died, yet here he was in blood-soaked clothes, arms stretched out, and not a scar on them. Susan's hand flew to her mouth as she looked at the man she'd never thought to see again. She'd certainly never hoped to see him without the snake and skull disfiguring the arm he'd wrapped around her when he'd promised he'd be back. He smiled, the same familiar, lopsided smile that had always set her heart racing, then collapsed in a heap at her feet; it would figure that even as the returning prodigal, he'd be trouble. He always had been. She struggled to get the body inside her door where no one would see it, dragging him over the threshold and hoping against reason that most of the blood on him wasn't his. If it were, she didn't think she'd be able to save him, and it wasn't as if she could call a Healer. Half the people in Britain would kill him for his bloodline; the other half would kill him for, it would seem, escaping it.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Blaise/Hermione**

It was clear neither of them would ever trust him again. Not that he could blame them, but it still hurt. He could explain until the sun set, rose, then set again that he'd had to do it to protect them both, but that didn't matter.

Blaise gathered Hermione into his arms and glared at their captor, their liberator, their enemy. "Unlocking the door doesn't make you the good guy," he said as he made his way out. "Watch your back, Malfoy, because when this is over, if you're still alive, I'm coming for you."

"Let's just go," Hermione said. Her voice shook with pain and exhaustion. "Otherwise he might change his mind."

"Gutless wonder," Blaise said as he pushed his way past the man who'd been his friend once.

Draco watched them go before he turned to plod his way back up the stairs to his room. He wished someone could unlock his door.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **Remus / Hermione**

"Penny for your thoughts?" Remus asked with a smile in his voice. Hermione had been distant since she'd come back from visiting Hogwarts and he wanted to cheer her up.

The look she gave him made his gut clench.

"I was going through the archives," she said. "Many of Snape's memories are preserved and I wanted to consult them as research for the book I'm writing on the rise of the second generation of Death Eaters."

Remus nodded. He suspected he knew what was coming.

"You let them bully that boy," she said. The words were soft but each one sliced into his skin with more pain than any transformation had ever caused him. "You stood by while your friends made his life hell, three or four on one, and you did nothing."

"I - " he began.

"I don't want anything to do with you," she said. The words had the finality of a decision she'd been mulling and he knew there would be no arguing her out of it. "I want you gone by morning."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - More from a prompt game on tumblr**


	34. Unfinished Fragment (Tom-Draco-Hermione)

**A/N - This was an idea I had, played with, fought with, and have finally given up on. It is incomplete, and destined to remain so, but if you want a snippet of a Tom/Draco/Hermione renaissance triad, I hope you enjoy. I am sure they all end up happily ever after.**

. . . . . . . . . .

Tom stalked through the halls of the palace, sparing not a thought or glance for the courtiers who stumbled out of his way. He moved past stained glass windows and passed stone alcoves where lesser men were wont to pass their time reading inept poetry to giggling girls in cut-rate satin who had been sent to court by doting mamas in the futile hope that their ugly ducklings might land a prince and thus be transformed to princesses. He had not a bit of interest in those idiot girls; rather, he wanted to find his own accursed hell-spawn of a fiancée and wring her miserable neck.

"Faithless trollop," he hissed when he finally found her standing under a chandelier and tapping her closed fan against her thigh as she ran her eyes across the content of a piece of parchment held in her other, dainty hand. "Did you think I wouldn't find out?!" He insolently dragged his eyes across the black brocade of her gown and let them linger on the swell of her bosom. "Whore. Daughter of whores."

She was, as usual, unmoved by his invective. "Good morrow, Tom," she said. "I trust you slept well?" She waved the paper in the air and added, "My whorish mother sends her regards."

He grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the stone wall of the corridor and snarled, "Don't think to play the fool with me, Hermione. Lord Malfoy is here, begging for but a moment of your time."

She flicked her eyes to the arm pinning her in place and, begrudgingly, Tom loosened his hold. "The fair one?" she asked.

"With accusations of foul witchcraft hidden beneath courteous words," Tom had to force himself not to tighten his fingers again.

"Is it you or me he means to so besmirch?" Hermione rapped her fan against his arm and, unwilling, Tom released her. "That will leave a bruise, Tom, she said. "I shall have to wear chokers to cover the outline of your hand which forces me to rethink my costume for the masque. I find I am most aggrieved with you, my lord, and so early in the day."

"I do not care about your costume, you foul witch," Tom hissed. "What does Malfoy want with you?"

"You have not answered my question," was all she said, then gave a delicate shrug of her shoulders. The practiced move made her tight gown tease with the possibility it would slip down and bare more of her flesh and, against his own volition, Tom's eyes slipped again to her cleavage. She smiled at his moment of weakness. "I suppose it doesn't matter," she mused. "It would be true either way."

"Witch," Tom said. "You are impossible."

"Nonsense," Hermione said, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm. "I am merely improbable, my lord."

"What does the little lordling want with you?" Tom's voice was low and insistent, his lips so near her ear anyone passing them would be sure they'd caught the dark and compelling young man in a moment of romantic weakness, whispering endearments to his lady love. "Have you been crowning me with horns, Hermione? I'll make you scream for days if you're playing me false, sweetling."

"You wrong me," she murmured, peering up at him from under her blackened lashes. "My fields are already well enough plowed."

Tom smiled down at her at that before he said, with evident frustration even if his rage had been turned aside, "What does he want, love?"

"Perhaps my lord would consider asking him," she suggested.

"He will lie," Tom said with quiet disdain.

"Ah, but the way he lies," Hermione nearly cooed. "That could reveal so many things."

. . . . . . . . . . .

"Lord Malfoy," Hermione said, dropping a curtsy that was perhaps a little deeper than protocol required. "How lovely to make your acquaintance."

"Miss Hermione, " the man said, bowing over her extended hand and keeping his eyes upon her face. Tom admired the way the pale lord in front of them resisted the urge to let his eyes so much as brush against the artfully displayed flesh. Hermione sat down in a chair that Tom procured for her, never so much as glancing behind her as she settled into it. Tom stood behind her as though he were in attendance and savored the way she managed to make it seem as though Lord Malfoy were suing for her favor. "I am delighted to at last meet you," Malfoy said. One hears such interesting things about the lovely Miss Hermione, come in from the country, sprung from nowhere."

Hermione opened her fan and began lazily moving it back and forth in front of her.

Lord Malfoy let his eyes glance over her black dress and said, a touch of false concern in his voice, "Are you in mourning? Have I come at a bad time?"

Hermione smiled at him. More than one matron had ere now expressed her disapproval that an unmarried girl should dress in such dark colors and so provocatively. If her engagement to Tom Riddle hadn't been such open knowledge, they would surely have expressed their belief that a girl so lost to proper feeling and decorum would never land a husband. "Why, Lord Malfoy," Hermione said, "I had no idea that among your many other talents you were a devotee of fashion. " She let her eyes run up and down the man's own dark garb. From his black unmentionables to his black velvet coat he was a study in the deepest night; the dark fabric set off his pale skin and pale hair with a drama of which he was surely not unaware. "Or are you yourself in mourning? If so, let me express my condolences."

"Touché, " Lord Malfoy said, his smile getting colder. "I have to wonder who you are to speak quite to brazenly. Not, I think, a drop of aristocratic blood in your veins, " Lord Malfoy continued.

"'Tis true, " Tom said. "My lady is like a rose found in the stable muck." He smiled. "No less a rose, however, for all that. "

"She suits you, I suppose, " Malfoy said.

Tom's smile tightened. "My mother's family is as old as they come, " he said.

"But your father…" Malfoy trailed off as if unwilling to bring up the social faux pas of Tom Riddle's parentage.

"It's true that my mother married, as people say, to spite her family." Tom regarded Malfoy with a steady gaze. "Died not shortly thereafter, " he added. "Raised in an institution."

"You weren't quite found in a handbag, " Hermione said with deliberate fondness laced through her voice. "Near enough, however. "

"Yes, "Lord Malfoy said, ignoring the scandalous comment about the handbag. "Your mother, one understands, quite bewitched your father. "

"She was a bewitching woman, "Tom agreed.

"Much, perhaps, as the lovely Miss Hermione has bewitched you?"

"Have you been casting your charms on people again, my love?" Tom asked. "The last time you did that, that poor fool had to be sent away from the court in disgrace. "

Malfoy put a look of polite interest on his face so Tom elaborated. "Some rustic from some godforsaken island, wasn't he, Hermione?"

"He wrote me poetry," she said. "I think his name was McClaggan."

"Poetry? " Tom said with a look of disdain upon his handsome face.

"Well, blank verse at least, "Hermione said with the polite amusement of a Lady of the court.

"Very blank," Tom agreed. "I would expect better from Lord Malfoy here. "

"Oh yes," Hermione agreed. "From someone with Lord Malfoy's advantages I would expect at least a canzone." She smiled up at the pale man. "Write me a canzone, Lord Malfoy, and I will save you a dance at the masque tomorrow night. "

"I may just do that, " the man replied. "It was a delight to meet with you, Miss Hermione. I find that I long to increase our acquaintanceship until we are telling one another our deepest – our darkest - secrets." He nodded his head at Tom. "Mr. Riddle."

"Lord," Hermione said.

"Yes?" Lord Malfoy said.

"His proper title is Lord," Hermione said, her smile never faltering.

"My apologies," Lord Malfoy said, bowing deeply over her hand again. Tom noticed that this time he permitted his eyes to glance at the woman's bosom, if only for a moment. Hermione didn't react but Tom was sure she was already considering how to turn the man's attraction to her advantage. Her endlessly agile mind and shameless willingness to use anything to her benefit was, after all, what had drawn him to her.

Tom found that he almost pitied the hapless Lord Malfoy.

. . . . . . . . . .

Tom admired Hermione's masque costume with a slight smirk when his eyes rested on the small ruff she'd added to the neckline of her black silk gown. She – or rather one of her maids – had pinned her dark, lustrous curls up and threaded blood-red roses so they peeked out with hints of color. A closer look at her skirts revealed deep red embroidered patterns. Her domino was black and scarlet and glittered in the candlelight.

"Dare I ask why you're dressed as," Tom said he he offered her his arm. He had restricted himself to the deepest of black velvets and a simple mask.

"I am God's wounds, of course," she said and he choked back a laugh. She tilted her head in an attitude of confused innocence. "I am very devout, my love. I spent an hour on my knees this morning praying for your soul."

"Was that what you were doing?" he asked.

Her lips, painted a whorish carmine, curved upward. "Two hours," she corrected herself. "One of which was spent in the chapel where his Excellency commented upon my piety and expressed regret that so few people said the rosary any longer."

Tom lifted her hand to his lips and brushed his mouth across her knuckles. "I appreciate all your prayers, my love," he said. "All of them." His tongue slid across her skin. "I hope you appreciate mine as well."

"Oh, I do," she said. She turned to look into the ballroom, already crowded with couples. "I wonder what delights tonight shall bring us. Eyes to see, I hope, and wings to let gossip fly."

"And tongues to undermine the Duke," Tom murmured. "Attention, love, I believe your fair suitor approaches."

Hermione turned to regard Lord Malfoy, who was indeed bearing down on them. Like Tom he had opted for a simple costume of black with a single, silver mask, though he had pushed his back upon his head and it held his blond hair away, baring the angular planes of the man's pointed face. "He's too sharp to be beautiful," Tom said in her ear. "Pity."

"You," Hermione said back in an undertone, "are trouble."

"Which is why you love me," Tom said. "Lord Malfoy," he greeted the man. "A pleasure to see you again so soon."

Malfoy held a small scroll of parchment out. He'd tied it with a black ribbon and tucked a flowering weed into the knot. Hermione pulled it out and handed it to the man who smirked for a moment until she turned and cooed, "How did you know my favorite wildflower, Lord Malfoy? Would you be so kind as to tuck it into a curl for me?"

As he was slipping the homely flower into the arrangement of roses he said, "I do hope you enjoy the poem, Miss Hermione. An ode to your blue eyes."

"My eyes are brown," she said, her voice an insipid simper.

"Like the mud from which she sprang," Tom offered.

"My mistake," Malfoy said, his smirk back in place.

Hermione offered him her hand. "I didn't say the poem had to be well done," she said and Malfoy's smile faltered. "But match me, my Lord, with a good dancer and I shall be quite content."

"No lady has yet complained of my skill," Draco Malfoy said as he offered her his arm.

"And men?" Tom asked. Malfoy turned his head sharply. "Have they had cause to complain?" Tom clarified with what of his expression wasn't obscured by his mask wholly bland.

Lord Malfoy reached up with his free hand and slide his sliver mask, frozen in a malicious, glittering smile, into place over his own features. "None have had the chance to do so, Mr. Riddle," he said before he laid Hermione into the ballroom and away from her fiancé.

After a few moments of silent turns upon the dance floor Draco Malfoy said, "Your grace is quite magical, Miss Granger."

She smiled at him. "I am so relieved to discover that gossip lied about you, Lord Malfoy, as it is so often wont to do."

His fingers tightened on her shoulder until they dug in quite painfully but his voice remained unmoved as he said, "In what way?"

"People told me you were subtle. Devious even." She turned her head to look at his fingers and then looked back at his face. "My lord will be quite displeased if you leave a mark on me."

Draco Malfoy loosened his grip.

"And I fear there is no magic to explain my skill," she added. "Just painful hours spent under the tutelage of a dancing master who permitted no failure." She spun away into the hands of another man in the line and when she returned to Malfoy she said, "I do hear tell you are quite the devilish one yourself."

"As you've pointed out," he replied, "gossip lies."

She pouted, a contrived and practiced expression, before she leaned in toward his ear and murmured, "But you're no Muggle."

Draco Malfoy nearly dropped her hand. Whatever he had expected this was not it. "Miss Granger?" he said, the words a question.

"I find I am in need of a bit of fresh air," was all she said. "And perhaps a glass of punch. The dancing has left me quite overheated. Would you be so kind as to fetch a glass for me and meet me on the veranda?" She opened her fan and began making at most a desultory effort to cool herself.

"I am your humble servant," he said, bowing over her hand.

"Do not make promises you do not intend to keep," Hermione said as he turned to leave. He spun on his high heels to look at her and while the silver mask hid any expression his intake of breath was more than audible. She smiled and kept her fan moving and the man nodded before he went to fetch the drink she had requested and she moved to the veranda. Tom caught her eye as she walked past and she made the slightest of nods. Her fiancé let his mouth curl up in a cruel, pleased smile just long enough for her to see it before he disappeared into a mass of sycophants to discuss politics, commerce, and religion and she slipped out to arrange herself on the veranda.

. . . . . . . . . .

"What does he want," Tom asked as grazed his teeth along the edge of Hermione's neck. She gasped and fisted her hands in his dark hair. Her maids had unlaced her tight dress and left her in the state of deshabille that she knew Tom loved. He yanked the wilted weed Draco Malfoy had tucked into her elaborate curls and crushed it in his fist. "Your aristocratic would-be lover, Hermione. What does he want?"

She tugged him closer so his mouth was right at hers before she murmured, "I assume you mean other than to have his wicked way with my fair self."

"He's the fair one and I'm the wicked one," Tom said, tossing the flower down so it lay by her on the pillow, "and if you betray me -"

"If you were to betray me," she said, cutting off his threat, "you would find death sweeter than any woman's thighs by the time I gave it to you."

Tom laughed and bit her lip as he pulled her hands out of his hair and pinned them above her head, grinding them into the bed with more force then necessary. She opened her mouth under his and let him take what he wanted even as he nudged her legs apart with one knee. He had to release one of her hands to pull the silken robe away and bare her to him, and she took the opportunity to scrape that freed hand along his back, leaving long, red lines from the nails he knew she had to have sharpened just to hurt him this way. He bit at her again and she arched under him. "Witch," he whispered as he slid into her.

"Ah," she said, her nails digging into him hard enough to really hurt with a pain that provided the perfect counterpoint to the sensations of thrusting into the wet and ready woman under him. "But I'm your witch."

"A thing I'd recommend you not forget," he said, pulling a laugh from her that mixed with a gasp as he shifted and, releasing her second hand, began using his fingers to rub against her. She began to convulse around him and he stopped so he could drag this out longer.

"Bastard," she said in frustration as she tried to push her pelvis up against him.

"No, love," he corrected her, pushing her back down. "My wretched parents were quite married."

She licked her lips and let her head tip to the side and closed her eyes as he allowed himself several moments of utterly selfish gratification before he lowered his head and began to suck at one erect nipple. She whimpered and Tom ran a hand along her curves. "You are so beautiful," he murmured against her breast. "I should thank the Bishop's mewling God that someone was foolish enough to send such dark perfection to court where she could fall into my clutches."

"I am not sure," she gasped out, "who is in whose clutches. I am the filthy peasant you're elevating."

"You," he corrected her as she came, shuddering at his touch, "are the witch I adore who I plan to bind to myself in marriage vows so old they make the Church you pray in every morning seem young." With his partner's pleasure seen to, Tom set himself to driving into her, heedless now of anything except his own building sensations until he, too, collapsed against her skin with her name on his lips. She ran a hand through his dark curls, far more gently than she had before, and he kissed the side of her neck.

"He knows," she said into the silence. Tom made an inquiring noise and she said, "That we're magical. He knows. He danced around it with coy little statements until I just pointed out he wasn't a Muggle himself."

Tom, growing soft now, rolled off of her and propped himself up on one elbow and looked at his lover and partner with concern. "Are you sure that was wise?" he asked. "What if he goes to the Bishop with accusations - "

"Then I die horribly," Hermione said with a shrug, "and a month later a new girl from the provinces arrives at court and poor Lord Riddle falls madly in love with some devout innocent, shocking everyone." She smiled at him. "Tiresome at the most, but I thought it worth the risk."

"I'd hate to have to court an innocent," Tom said. "I much prefer you as your scandalous self."

"Devout, however," she said.

Tom snorted.

"My suspect devotion aside," Hermione said, "our dear Lord Malfoy is one of us and more than interested in our plots against the Duke." She smiles at Tom. "And in me."

"You are interesting," Tom said, running a hand over the curve of her hip. "And therefore any man who isn't interested in you is a fool." She preened like a cat under his stroking hand and he tangled his fingers in her curls and tugged at the hair before letting his fingers drop to slide through her folds. She twitched her hips away and he sighed. "I could - " he began but she shook her head.

"I'm tired," she said. "I wish you could stay the night."

He brushed his lips across her skin. "Me too, lovely," he said, "but until we're properly married it's too chancy. We'd get caught and then those hypocritical fools would refuse to marry us in the Church and all our plans - "

"I know," she said with a sigh. "I just despise these roles sometimes."

"Filthy Muggles," Tom said in agreement. "I would kill them all for you."

"And I would let you, but - "

"Power," he said and she nodded.

"Back to our lordling," Hermione said as Tom sat up and began pulling his black trousers on again. "He's interested in me, in contacting other magic users who aren't the Duke's pets, and, unless I am very much mistaken, in you."

Tom paused as he slipped his feet into his boots. "That make things more interesting," he said. "Or potentially so. Would you share?"

"Would you?" she countered.

"If I were there?" Tom said rather musingly. "I think I might quite like seeing you writhe beneath someone else, knowing it's at my discretion."

"I," Hermione said, "would enjoy watching Lord Malfoy kneel at your feet."

Tom Riddle leaned over the bed to kiss her one last time. "Then we are decided?" he asked. "We seduce the man and take his measure?"

"Indeed."

. . . . . . . . . .

Lord Malfoy proved harder to seduce than his early attentions had suggested would be the case. He nodded cordially at Hermione when he passed her in the halls but he deftly avoided any attempts to lure him into an alcove or empty room. He danced attendance on other ladies with their fans and their simpers and their impeccable breeding until Hermione became first annoyed and then furious. His polite disregard riled her more than any outward slurs or insults might have and Tom bore the results of her growing frustration in bloody lines down his back he refused to heal. "From suffering comes pleasure," he murmured in her ear as he held her hair with enough force to bring tears to her eyes. "I'll enjoy these reminders of our stolen moments as I watch your apparently incompetent flirtations." He traced his tongue along her skin. "You disappoint me."

She bit his lip at that hard enough that he was forced to use magic to tame the swelling. The warning had been delivered, however, and Hermione abandoned even the pretense of subtlety and fainted into Draco Malfoy's arms. "My lord," she said fluttering her eyes as she regained consciousness. "Why do you hover over me so? I thought I had lost your attentions."

"I considered letting you just fall to the floor," he said, "but as that would have caused even more of a spectacle than Tom Riddle's fiancee toppling onto me, I rejected the idea." He traced a finger over her lips. "I made you fetch me, Miss Granger. I've quite liked watching you pant after me, more and more desperate with each passing day. You've been, shall we say, enchanting to observe."


	35. Later (Fred-Hermione)

Hermione stood at the doorway, Declarations were going on, and posturing, and the air throbbed with a horrible mixture of fear and adrenaline. She almost jumped when she felt a hand touch her arm, then smiled, half-embarrassed, half-relieved when it was just Fred Weasley.

"You ready?" he asked her.

She shrugged. Could one be?

He bit at the side of his mouth, and the sparkle in his eyes seemed momentarily serious. "I know you and Ron," he began, then took a deep breath. "Don't write me off."

"Fred?" She hadn't known her mouth could go dry at four words. She hadn't known she could suddenly not care about fear at all.

He must have seen that on her face because the grin came back to his mouth and he darted in to leave a kiss on her cheek. "See you when it's done?" he asked, and she nodded, her hand going up to where he'd kissed her.

"See you when it's over," she said.

He darted off and she yelled at his retreating back, "You have some explaining to do!"

"Later," he called back over his shoulder.

It was the last thing he ever said to her.


	36. Snooping (Tom-Hermione)

"What do you think you are doing?" Tom asked.

Hermione looked up from his desk. She had all the drawers open, files strewn about, and a coffee cup leaving a brown ring on the day's _Prophet_. She didn't even have the grace to look ashamed or embarrassed to be caught snooping.

"Abraxas," she said. "I'm trying to find out how he died."

"Dragon Pox," Tom said. He began to gather the folders up, his irritation growing because she hadn't made any effort to keep them in any sort of order. "That's common knowledge."

"But did you kill him?" the witch demanded.

Tom didn't even stop what he was doing. She'd piled years of obsessive record keeping every which way, and it was so out of character he wanted to hit her. Of course, if he did that, she'd likely set his balls on fire so he restrained himself. "Why do you care?" he asked. "He's been dead for years."

"Did you do it?" she pressed.

"Of course I did," he snapped. Honestly, she'd mixed the Malfoy folders and the Lestrange folders up so badly it would take all night to get them right again. "Are you going to help me clean this up or not?"

* * *

 **A/N - Thank you to doctor-molly-hooper-holmes for the prompt on Tumblr**


	37. The Problems Being Dark Lady (TomHr)

"You'll crack eventually," Hermione said. She leaned back in her chair and pried her shoes off, first one and then the other. Heels were so uncomfortable. The clothing was what she hated most about being Dark Lady. Heels and corsets and crowns that pinched and gave her the headache. Why couldn't she be a Dark Lady in jogging bottoms and trainers?

"Tom," she yelled out toward the backroom. He was shirking again, off playing with that damn snake. "You told me you would help. Just gather the dissidents in, you said, and I'll help question them."

He stuck his head in the doorway. "Can't you finish this one?" he asked. He looked over at the prisoner, hands tied behind his back and furious expression of defiance on his face. "Just throw a couple of crucios at him."

"Crucio gives me a stomach pain," Hermione said. "And it's my monthly so I've got quite enough of that going on."

Tom made a face but relented. "Fine," he said. "Go take a bath or something. Honestly, sometimes I think I have to do everything around here."

She was halfway down the corridor when she heard him yell, "Merlin, are you going to just leave those shoes lying here? I almost tripped on them. If I fall and break my neck you'll be stuck running this empire by yourself, just so you know!"

* * *

 **A/N - Thank you to raindeer-flotilla for the prompt on Tumblr**


	38. Scones (Luna-Pansy)

Pansy didn't think she'd ever be happy after the war. She'd ruined her life in one panicked sentence. It didn't matter she'd been a child, or that she'd been terrified, or even that the blighter had gone and done what she suggested. She'd always be the Girl Who Gave Up Potter.

It wasn't a title to envy.

So she sat by herself in the tea shop, back stiff, eyes fixed firmly on the cup in her hand. She wouldn't let these people know she could feel their eyes and hear their whispers. She had her pride, at least. It was a thin meal, but she lived on it even if she had to dine alone.

"I like your shoes," a rather dreamy voice said, and she looked up to see Luna Lovegood, of all people, settle down across from her. "They gave me two scones because one was broken a bit and they were going to throw it out so I saved it and thought we could share. Scones make everything better, don't you agree?"

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to theeldritchwitch for the prompt on Tumblr**


	39. A Murderous Fool (Tom-Hermione)

"You've managed to insult me three times and it's not even 9AM," Tom said. He shifted so the chain on one wrist sat more comfortably and regarded his interrogator. He remained less than amused that immortality meant that, Harry Potter be damned, they'd managed to bring him back _again_ , this time to teach the Ministry of Magic all his dark tricks.

He had no intention of teaching them anything, oppressive little fascists that they were. Sure, he'd been after power, but at least he'd had the decdency to not hide that fact under layers of reports that had to be filled out or hearings that must be had. He'd been more of the 'kill first, hold a meeting second' varietal of evil.

He shifted again and kept his face bland as the final tumbler in the padlock fell into place. They hadn't let him have a wand, and the room had been designed to suppress magic, but he was the best damn wizard in centuries and you'd think that people who cared enough about his knowledge to bring him back from the dead again, quite against his wishes, would have kept that in mind. He'd been wandlessly hooking and unhooking these locks for weeks and now he'd finally solved the very last combination. It was, as the saying went, showtime.

The bushy-haired, self-righteous researcher turned away and made another note in her folder. "Mmm," she said. "Was it being called murderous or a fool you found most objectionable."

He looked at the back of her neck. She hadn't seemed stupid. Certainly, she hadn't seemed stupid enough to turn her back on a predator. Like the rest of them, she had too much faith in the chains that bound and the wand that wasn't.

He pulled the manacles free and lunged across the room, fastening one hand along her throat and using the other to liberate her wand from her pocket. "I quite own being murderous," Tom said. "But, Hermione Granger, I think you might want to reevaluate your opinion that I am a fool."

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - thank you to tinyholesinthesky for the prompt on Tumblr.**


	40. Breathing (Pansy-Draco, Pansy-Blaise)

She couldn't breathe whenever she was with him. She hated that. Since they had been children, Draco had stolen her breath, her sense, her soul almost. She turned from a vibrant, living creature to a fawning ghost, clinging to him, desperate for any kind of acknowledgement, holding ever more tightly as he shrugged her off and sneered at his friends.

It hurt even as she was doing it.

She despised herself for it even as she rated days by how much attention he paid to her.

"Hey Pans," Draco said. He slid into the booth at the pub and her will slunk away and her smile grew tremulous. She knew he wasn't there for her, probably thought she was a nuisance, but a traitorous part of herself reminded her she'd had her hair done that morning, that she'd looked so good when she left her flat that three separate men had stopped to smile at her on the street. If there was ever a day he'd finally see her, it was today.

"Hey Drakey," Pansy said. She always sounded ridiculous when she talked around him. Her heart rate sped up and her mouth got dry and sometimes she thought she didn't even like him so why did she want his attention so much?

Draco rolled his eyes at the nickname, then jabbed Blaise with his elbow so hard the other man narrowed his eyes. "What?" he asked.

"She said yes," Draco said. He grinned, and for a moment the war-haunted man was replaced by the exuberant, arrogant boy he'd been at fifteen. "Astoria said yes."

Pansy fumbled with her bag as her heart stopped. Could a heart stop? Could you live without a beating heart? Apparently you could. The bag was designer. She'd bought at in Paris. It went with her shoes, but not in a tacky matchy-matchy way, not the way Astoria always dressed. They complemented. She pulled out a few coins, probably way too much for the drink she'd had. "Congratulations," she managed to say as she stood and dropped them onto the table. One fell to the floor, but before she could reach down to scrape her fingers across the sticky wood and find it, Blaise had it in his hand. He tossed it to the others with the grace she'd lost. "That's great. Be sure to send me an invitation."

"Of course," Draco said, oblivious as always. "Wouldn't dream of leaving you out. Blaise - "

But before he could go on, Blaise had risen with panther-like fluidity. "I hate to have such atrocious timing, Malfoy, but Pansy and I were just leaving. There's an exhibit at that new Gallery I wanted to show her. Congratulations, of course."

Pansy almost tripped on her heels at that artless lie.

"That's great," Draco said. "Have fun." He was already scanning the room to see who else he could tell.

She and Blaise were half a block down the pavement when she said, "Gallery?"

He quirked his lips up in a half-smile. "Now that you're finally going to look past Malfoy, I thought I might be able to talk you into coming up to my flat to see my etchings."

The pick up line was so hackneyed she laughed but when she looked at his wide, slanted eyes they were studying her with so much care she knew he was serious. Guarded, maybe, but serious. It was the last thing she would have expected. She'd known him since they were eleven. How long had she missed this?

"I - ," she began.

"No pressure," he said, his hand on her elbow steering her toward the district where he lived. "But I do have an excellent collection of small pen and ink drawings by continental artists you might enjoy."

"And high thread count sheets?" she asked, now sure she knew where this was going and already tired. She'd thought better of Blaise than to try to get a quick fuck out of her apparently obvious pathetic crush. But then, she'd thought Draco would see her perfect blow out and her good shoes and notice her. She wasn't doing well in the assumptions game today.

His hand on her tightened a moment. "I want more than sex," he said.

"But less than love."

She was going to turn and go when he said, "I didn't say that," and she was frozen, heels on the cobblestones and expensive bag swinging from her arm. Her breath had caught in her throat but this time it felt like something other than misery. This time it felt like magic.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to rebelsaurus29 for the prompt on Tumblr.**


	41. Cheating (Marcus-Hermione)

"What did you do?" Hermione could hear the way her voice was escalating up to a shriek and she tried to remember what Ginny had said about staying calm in an argument. "How could you possibly have caused such a mess?"

Of course, bloody be-damned Ginny didn't live with a man who tracked mud through the flat, dropped reeking gear on the floor, and grinned at her with that cursed smile showing the one crooked tooth no amount of magic seemed to be able to straighten. "Hermione," Marcus began, wheedling in his voice and enough mischief she knew – she knew! – he'd done it all on purpose. "It's Saturday and we're all going out. I came back to get you, get cleaned up,maybe have a - "

"No!" She almost exploded. "No quickie."

The grin got bigger and her heart rate sped up and she knew she was getting flustered. Curse him and the way that smile always got him what he wanted. He knew it too. There wasn't a way to cheat to victory Marcus Flint hadn't found and if she weren't the same way she'd be so much angrier. As it was, well, magic would clean it all up in an instant as soon as one or the other of them cared to bother.

She turned her back and crossed her arms and waited and, predictably, Marcus slid his arms around her and rubbed a sweaty filthy cheek against her. "Slow then?" he whispered in her ear. "We don't have to be at the pub for two hours."

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to nauticalparamour for the prompt on Tumblr**


	42. What Sort of Idiot? (Drarry)

I didn't think he had it in him. It's one of those horrible, fundamental truths, of course: you can never really know another person. I'd stared at Potter for years until I'd memorized every idle gesture from the sullen way he crossed his arms when he was tired of being berated by Granger to the way he beamed with raw delight at things that should have been ordinary.

I knew he was poor long before anyone else had figured it out. He liked simple things too much.

I thought I knew everything about him.

He never looked at me. I mean, he looked at me. He curled his lip, and rolled his eyes, and despised me and if you'd asked my friends they would have said Potter stared at me every time I walked into a room but it wasn't the way he looked at Weasley. It wasn't the way he looked at Weasley's sister. He didn't smile when he saw me. His mouth didn't quirk up in that little half grin that said he couldn't believe how fortunate he was to know them. I'd sit at that long wooden table eating the unfortunate food Hogwarts served us and stare at the back of his head as he smiled for them. He had a curl. Has a curl. It sits on the right side and has always kept his hair from ever lying quite right. He had a curl and he had a scar and he had friends and then the war was over and I hadn't seen him except in hagiographic excess in the Prophet for over a year when I realized I missed him. When I realized why.

Not that I planned to do anything about it.

I knew him, but I knew myself too. Cowardice has always been the cloak that I wrapped myself in. It keeps you safe, that cloak.

Or I thought I knew him.

Until I opened the door and instead of a witch wanting to talk to me about some political thing or other, and could I sign here and maybe donate a bit, Potter stood there, hair unruly and trainers soaked through. You'd think he'd have more sense than to step in puddles. We lived in London. It was wet.

"Can I come in?" he asked, raking a hand through his hair. I'd always thought he'd done that so people would see his scar. It flashed at me, proof he was the chosen one and I, well, I was not.

I stepped aside.

"What brings you here," I asked.

He took a deep breath and seemed to search about for something to say. "I missed you," he said at last. He took a few steps into my flat and looked around.

"Take your shoes off before you ruin the rugs," I said, probably too crossly but I didn't want to go through this. I didn't think he had it in him, you see. What sort of idiot loves a man with a Mark on his arm?

Of course, what sort of idiot walks into the woods to let a madman kill him?

Turns out the same sort.


	43. Found and Lost (Tom-Abraxas)

I found Tom first. He was brilliant. Even in a school filled with clever boys and sharp witted girls - though I admit I've never been drawn to the fairer sex - he left us all behind. He'd throw back an arm and his patched robes would splay out over the couch in the common room and he'd ask a question about magic and my breath would catch at the implications. We were all scrambling to memorize tricks and incantations and he was seeing the way the world fit together, blood and book and bell and candle. He made it new. He made it gleam. I've never known his equal; I don't expect I ever will. I know that you won't.

Are you getting this all down? They will tell lies about him, you know. They will paint him as a villain, or maybe a saint. I can't predict which, and it really doesn't matter. They will silence him any way they can. I know power and I know how it takes and corrupts and absorbs. Malfoys live and breathe power - it's why he wanted me - and I know what the world he is trying to save will do to him. He is too radical. Too demanding. Too brutal.

200 years ago it didn't matter. Muggles? Being afraid of them was like being afraid of a boggart: something for children and housewives who spend too much time reading The Daily Prophet. But now? We've hidden ourselves away and stopped acknowledging them, and while we sat around and enjoyed ourselves they made a world that no unforgiveable can tame.

We are in trouble.

You are not writing. I brought you here so you could write this down.

Did I love him? Does it matter? I tied my life to his. I tied my family's life to his plans. He used to cup his hand along the back of my neck and murmur, _Do you know what you do to me_ as if it weren't obvious. He always tasted like flat beer, something some of the life had gone out of. A little stale, a little rancid. It was odd, I suppose, but I never questioned it. Love wasn't the point. Power was, and I traded him mine for what I thought was his, what I thought was ours. Our world's. Our people's.

Do not let them silence him. This Pox will take me before he can see it through. I don't know how I got such a ridiculous disease. I am too young for such a thing. Tom toasted me at our last meeting. _My old friend_ , he said. Y _ou have always known me best. Without you, I would be lost._

I beg of you, do not let him get lost.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to jackwhitesgirl on Tumblr for the prompt.**


	44. Quiet (Theo-Pansy)

Pansy leaned back against the cold stone wall. In moments of quiet, which were few, she could almost hear the battle going on above, or at least she imagined she could. She had always thought of the dungeons at Hogwarts as homey. As home. She'd lived seven years in one of them, and it was a place of magic and wonder. Giant glass sheets looked out into the lake. The Slytherin Common Room was the stuff of fairy tales.

So, she supposed, was this. Only this dungeon came right out of one of the horrible ones. This dungeon came from the sorts of stories where you did everything you could to stay unnoticed. Having the fairies see you was never good.

She should have remembered that. She'd let herself be noticed. _Give him Potter_ , she'd screamed. Give the monster what he wants and maybe he'll go away. It was why people put out milk for fairies, after all. Keep them far away from you.

She could feel the cold and damp of the stones. It wormed its way through her outer robes and then through the shirt she'd bought over the holiday. She'd lied and said, _School's fine, Mum, don't worry about me. The Carrows are all bark and no bite._

She'd seen what happened to the families of children who complained. Write a letter home that they were beating students, they were torturing students, and find a death notice slipped under your door later that week. _It's fine_ , she'd said. _I'm a little worried about N.E.W.T.s of course. Sorry if I seem a little distracted._

Her mother had smiled and paid for the shirt, and shoes to match. She'd been happy to be reassured. Eager, even.

"You okay?" Theodore Nott slid down to sit next to her. She shrugged, the universally understood sign for _I am not but stop asking_ , and he reached over and took her hand in his. One of her nails had gotten chipped when they'd dragged her, screaming, from the Great Hall.

 _Give him Potter_.

She wondered how much she'd come to regret that. He'd never done anything for her, of course. Not her, not hers. Not the scared first years sniveling in packs, not the lean boy next to her who saw thestrals and who tightened his grip on her hand at that oh-so-false shrug.

"Me either," he said. "But it'll be fine."

She looked at him at that and he smiled. It was a look too wan to be believed, but, like her mother, she wanted to be reassured so she held on to the way his mouth tipped up and ignored the worried crease between his eyes. "Yeah," she said. "I'm sure it will be."

He pulled her close and began to spin a story. When they got out of here, out of the locked jail where they'd been shoved by their own teachers, they'd travel. He'd always wanted to see the world. She let her head fall to his shoulder as he went on, telling her about some improbable animal in North America that had needles for fur. "It will be fine," he said again. "I can tell. You're like me, one of the sane ones. We survived this year, we'll survive tonight, and then we'll slip away. Wash dishes as we travel. No banks, no records, no passports. We'll disappear."

"I'd like that," she said. She was half asleep by now. She'd wanted to be pretty and vivacious and loved for so long and now all she wanted was to sit very still until she was as hidden as a moth, its grey wings pressed against the soot-stained bark of a city tree. Dirty, common, invisible. It was better to be quiet.

She should have been quiet.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to** **lunamalcoy for the prompt on Tumblr**


	45. Page 23 (Pansy-Blaise)

She hadn't remembered to close the blinds and the sun hurt. In fairness, it had been late - or early - when she fell into bed, and she hadn't been quite sober.

She's been too pissed to walk, if she remembered correctly. She screwed up her face against the hangover onslaught and then cautiously opened her eyes into the far too bright room when it didn't come.

"Sleeping beauty stirs, I see."

Pansy glared at Blaise. Some things were worse than a hangover, and a perfectly dressed Blaise Zabini stretched out in a chair in her room qualified.

"How did you get in here?"

"You invited me up," he said. He sounded as damnably amused as he always did and she closed her eyes again. Had she been drunk enough she could claim alcohol induced memory loss? Another person who refused to see her, the girl who'd tried to sell out Potter, and she'd ordered another drink. Then another. Then she'd hit on him. She'd tried to strip his clothes off in the pub while several of his mates - if Zabini could be said to have anything as plebian as mates - hooted.

"Well, you should leave and never come back," she said. He must have slipped an anti-hangover potion into her last drink because she should be seeking out death right now and all she wanted was eggs. Eggs and maybe some coffee and a tomato or two and did that place on the corner have bacon or only sausage? She couldn't remember. Either would be fine. Both would be better. As soon as Zabini took off, she'd get up and get dressed and -

Shite.

As that thought entered her head she realized getting dressed was something she needed to do before she so much as sat up. She wasn't even wearing knickers.

"Did we…?" she began.

"Not for lack of enthusiasm on your part, but no," he said before she could list off any one of the many things she'd fantasized about doing with the insanely perfect looking Zabini over the years. She'd written some of them down. "And I was afraid if I took off you'd follow me and find someone less scrupulous."

"So you stayed," she said. "Wonderful. Noble. Now go."

He made no move to even stand up. Worse, he curled his mouth up into that little, arrogant half-smile she'd seen him wear back at Hogwarts whenever he felt especially pleased with himself. "You did show me your journal," he said. "Quite good reading for a long night of watching you."

Pansy considered death.

"Perhaps we could try page 23 after breakfast," he said. "Though I will need a substantial meal to have the energy for that."

"I - "

His smile grew. "Be good and some day I'll tell you one of mine."

"Am I in it?" she muttered as she pulled the top sheet free and began to wrap it around her torso so she could walk to the shower without showing him every inch of her skin. She expected the answer to be one of his smug, condescending laughs. She wasn't the sort of girl men like Zabini fantasized about. She was halfway across the room, trailing spare fabric like a bridal train when he answered her.

"In detail."

She decided as she washed her hair that it made sense to have breakfast with him. She should treat him after he'd been so gallant as to sit there all night. And after, well, she'd let after take care of itself.

Page 23 wasn't, after all, an offer a girl got every day.

. . . . . . . .

 **A/N - thank you to rowanofferelden for the prompt on Tumblr**


	46. Too Late (Drarry)

The paper was filled with nothing but accolades and every time he read one it hurt. A sensible person would have refused to look. A smart person would have left well enough alone. No one, however, had ever accused Draco Malfoy of being smart or sensible when it came to Harry Potter and so he read them all.

Worse, he sought them out.

He hunched over papers and magazines and read and read and read until he wanted to scream because everyone loved Potter. Everyone had something to say about him. Almost every person who'd ever been in a classroom with the rotter had a quote somewhere praising him. The Daily Prophet had left no proverbial stone unturned. The whole field of Britain was nothing but uprooted rocks with praise for Harry Potter under them all.

No one had asked him anything, of course. Their rivalry and mutual dislike was too well known. Somehow that was galling. Someone should have asked. He'd have been so gracious. Oh, Potter, can't say a bad thing about him. Schoolboy stuff, of course, but he's a good egg.

But no one gave him the chance to be gracious. No one mentioned him at all. He read every line and there wasn't a single word about him, how he hadn't turned Potter over, how he could have, how he'd saved his life.

"Bastard," Draco muttered, shoving aside yet another paper with yet another article. He wished, just once, he could read Potter's name and feeling nothing. "I want to feel nothing," he said out loud. He said the word nothing again, as if to see if it felt like a lie. "Nothing."

Nothing would be better than this burning almost jealousy, this wish that Potter would notice him, would single him out the way he did Weasley and Granger and Longbottom and every other person but not him.

"Nothing."

It felt like a lie. It tasted like falsehood and ruin and loathing. It felt like the hot burn of water at his eyes because he was the one who was nothing. He'd ruined it all, all from the start, and now there was nowhere to go and nothing to say and no way to begin again.

"I wish," he said and then stopped. There was no point. It was all over now. If anyone asked, he'd be gracious. He'd say all the right things, stiff upper lip, enough emotional repression to open a shop selling the stuff. He'd never let on how much he just wanted to be noticed. How much he'd always wanted Potter to see him. To like him.

To love him.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to superflarre for the prompt on Tumblr**


	47. A Useful Tool (Tomione)

Hermione ran her fingers along the taut line of his neck. She knew he hated to be touched and only his unwillingness to let her see that kept him in place. It was why she ran her thumb up into the base of his skull and let it sit there, half a caress and half a casual reminder of what a good place that was to shove a knife. His ring sat there at the base of that thumb , too large for any other finger, the dark stone half-hidden by his hair. She let her hand shift so he could feel the cold metal against his skin. One broken curse later, and she had some jewellery, and a bit more. A leash.

"I missed you," she said. The words were near enough to true, and they made him stir a bit. She hadn't been by to check on him in several weeks and she tried not to go that long for fear solitude would make him mad. Madder. Though perhaps she was the mad one, keeping him here like a pet.

"I doubt that," he said. "I didn't miss you."

She shrugged. "But like calls to like," she said. "We are one and the same."

Tom Riddle wrenched himself away from her. "I'm nothing like you," he said, half-spitting the words. "Mudblood."

"You know that doesn't bother me," she said. She plucked at the chain around her neck and felt the weight of the locket swing from it. "We could be as one, Tom. Soulmates, even."

Oh, the glower that pulled from him. She flicked a glance at the door of the Room of Requirement and tried not to gloat, though it was hard. "I'm Tom," the time-traveling student had said, all obsequious charm, hands spread in helpless inquiry. "I seem to be lost."

"Tom?" she'd asked.

"Tom Riddle," he'd said.

"I know exactly where to take you," she'd said. "Just follow me."

"I'll never agree," he said now. "And you can't keep me here forever."

She stepped away. She had N.E.W.T.s to study for, after all, and Harry had made her promise to go to a Quidditch scrimmage that afternoon. World domination could wait another day. "Well," she said. "Continue to think about it. We could be great together. Terrible, but great."

She heard the bit of debris he threw hit the door behind her and laughed before she swung her bag over her shoulder and strode off, the Head Girl everyone trusted, the Boy Who Lived's best friend.

He'd break eventually. Then with his prodigal skills and her ruthlessness, the world would be theirs.

Or hers.

But he was a useful tool.

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N thank you to slytherinbloodwhore for the prompt on Tumblr**


	48. Squinting (Tom-Hermione)

Tom watched the head of curls weave through the Dining Hall and tightened his shoulders as she stopped to talk first to some Ravenclaw. The boy had a spot on his cheek, and a trio of larger ones on his forehead, and the squint you saw in fools to vain to wear their glasses. What did he have to be vain about. He was hardly attractive and the way he narrowed his beady eyes to peer at her made him look like a mangy rat.

When the Ravenclaw laughed at something Hermione said, Tom curled his hands into fists until the nails dug into his skin. How dare he?

She stopped again to talk to a Gryffindor, and then another Ravenclaw, and by the time she disappeared through the wide doors, Tom's tension had become so obvious Abraxas, not normally the most perceptive of his flunkies, asked if something were amiss.

"No," Tom said shortly. She was supposed to meet him in ten minutes in the fifth classroom on the fourth floor and he would have things to say to her. Oh, yes, he would. They had an agreement. They had an arrangement, and the arrangement and agreement did not include her flirting with every worthless sot that crossed her path.

She'd fallen through time into his life because he was the important one, not the spotty Ravenclaw. He was going to remake history. He was going to make her a queen.

He managed not to stomp his way to the fourth floor, and managed not to slam the door open, but he didn't control his expression once he closed it behind him. It was a look of furious displeasure that only a trusted few saw, and those few were wise enough to be afraid of it.

"How dare you," she said. She was pointing a wand at him and he reached for his only to realize she'd already jerked it into her own free hand. "We have an agreement and I saw you making eyes at that girl, the one with the brown hair whose always sniffling."

"I was not - " Tom began, but a cascade of birds had already erupted from her wand and were aiming their tiny beaks at his skin.

They hurt.

It took ten whole minutes to undo her spell without his wand, and by the time he'd vanished the last bird he was covered in blood and laughing with the delight of the whole thing. She watched him without a word but, when the last bird disappeared, he could see her mouth twitch up into the tiniest of smiles.

"You're wonderful," he said as she handed him his wand back. "Bitch."

"Love you too," she said.

He was still laughing when he pulled her into a kiss. He would make her a queen, or maybe - just maybe - she'd make him into a king. Either way, a future he wouldn't squint at.


	49. Burn It (Ginny-Blaise)

Ginny had kept the diary. It had taken more than a little stealth to get it back, but the youngest Weasley could sneak her way past six older brothers and one very attentive mother. One enchanted headmaster's office was trivial.

She didn't quite know why she'd wanted it. She hated it, hated what it represented, hated what Tom Riddle had done to her. As the war dragged on and she became more and more familiar with what he'd done to himself, she hated the diary even more. She still couldn't bring herself to throw it away.

Every time she moved she pulled it out of the box where she'd shoved it, looked at it, and put it back, better books, safer books, stacked on top of it. IT stayed in that box when she left Hogwarts. It stayed in that box when she left The Burrow. And it almost stayed in that box as she packed up to leave her fifth flat in three years, this time to try her hand at an Italian villa and its charming, maddening, captivating resident.

"What's that?" Blaise asked as she pulled it out, sighed, and got ready to put it back.

"A book," she said shortly. Her fingers shriveled back from touching the cover with the rotten hole piercing through the rotten core. She really did hate this thing.

Blaise's eye rested on the name of the book's original owner. She'd told him the whole thing - the only one of her many boyfriends to have gotten that much honesty from her. Something about the way Harry had managed to forget she'd gone through that made her reluctant to talk about it. Maybe the nightmares and whispers she heard in the corners of her brain were just drama. Maybe she wasn't as scarred by the whole thing as she thought she was, or maybe that scarring was a sign of weakness.

She needed to just get over herself, she'd always thought. Her self pity about the whole affair would bore anyone and so she'd kept it quiet and kept Tom Riddle tucked up against her heart.

"You kept it?" he said. It was half a question, half a very carefully neutral statement. He hadn't been bored by her story. He'd been horrified, and then angry, and she'd had to threaten him to keep him from apparating right to her parents' house and speaking to them in that cold, calm voice he got when he was truly angry.

There was, after all, a reason she was willing to move in with him.

"I did," she said.

He nodded, too understanding. Too damned insightful. She wasn't sure what she expected him to do. Recoil, maybe, or get a nervous, worried squint in the creases between his eyes. Instead he twitched his wand at the fireplace and the half-charred log they'd sat in front of the night before flared into life.

"Let it burn," he said. She hesitated and when she didn't toss it right in he said, one hand coming to rest on her shoulder, "Let it go, Red."

The leather cover smelled terrible as it caught and burned.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to rowanofferelden for the prompt on tumblr.**


	50. Hair Tie (Harry-Pansy)

The thing Harry hated most about Pansy Parkinson was the way she pushed her hair back when she was reading. She'd been coming into the same coffee shop he liked for three weeks, always ordering the same thing, always sitting in the broken down green arm chair by the window with the spider plant. She'd kick her shoes off, tuck one foot under her, and read her book for an hour, then leave. And the whole time she shoved her hair back behind one ear only to have it fall forward again. She'd do it over and over again for the whole hour and he kept seeing the motion out of the corner of his eye and it distracted him.

He was supposed to be reviewing a long series of dull regulations. There were rules for Aurors - so many rules - and most of them hadn't been updated since 1479. In 1479 some poor sucker had been asked to review them all, and had.

Apparently it was his turn to be the sucker.

He hated it.

He didn't like fighting dark wizards. The idea had seemed noble when he'd been fifteen but now he thought he might have changed his mind and being asked to read through pages and pages of this garbage and make suggestions for changes wasn't making the job any more appealing. He'd taken to abandoning the Ministry offices to work here where the coffee was better because there was no way any human being could read through this stuff without coffee. He'd asked Hermione for help and she'd laughed at him - actually laughed - and told him no friendship was great enough to take that on.

And he'd been doing fine until Pansy had starting appearing. Every little shove of her hair distracted him, and then he'd realize he'd been staring at her cute nose and her perfect lips and her smart little skirts for ten minutes and he'd force his eyes back to the parchment in front of him.

Then she'd push that hair back again.

He finally couldn't stand it and on a Monday at 2:37 in the afternoon he shoved his hand in her face with the elastic hair tie he'd taken from the table where Hermione had left it when she'd gone up to Ron's room the night before. "If you tied that mess back you'd stop having to play with it," he said.

She looked slowly up from her book and met his eyes for so long he began to squirm under that gaze. "Potter," she said at last. She plucked the elastic from his fingers, placed it between the pages of her book, and closed the cover with a snap. "What's it to you?"

"You're bothering me," he said, realizing how stupid that sounded as soon as the words left his lips.

"So?" she asked.

He had to bluster on now. He'd trapped himself. "I have to read this," he said. He had the day's pages in his other hand. They were confidential. He couldn't just go about leaving them on coffee shop tables. "I can't focus with you around."

She shrugged. "So stay in your office," she said.

"I hate my office." Sometimes you only hear the truth when you say it out loud, and all the ways he's resented this work, and all the ways being an Auror was a letdown, and all the ways he didn't want to ever have to fight a Dark wizard again crystalized in that one sentence and he sank down into the hard, wooden chair directly opposite her and said again, "I hate it."

The spider plant brushed against his cheek and he batted it away with annoyance. Pansy reached over and took the pages out of his hand and skimmed them. "You read through this on purpose?" she asked.

"It's my job," he said helplessly.

"So quit," she said. "You're rich aren't you?"

Harry nodded, though he still felt poor. He still felt like the kid wearing ill-fitting hand-me-downs and he suspected he always would. Her face softened for a moment and he wondered bitterly which of the 'Poor Harry' unauthorized biographies she'd read. They ranged from sentimental to salacious and none of them did more than flirt with the truth but most liked to dwell on the horrific Muggle parenting he'd endured. Abuse sold.

She slipped her book down into her bag, put her foot back into her shoe, and stood up. "Good," she said. "Since you're rich you can afford to take me to dinner."

"It's the middle of the afternoon," Harry said. "I have to go back to - "

"Ugh," she said. "You do not. Are you taking me on a date or not?"

Harry decided he was. He most emphatically was. And he did. The Ministry sent three owls demanding the classified and confidential files back and one Howler denouncing him for quitting after they'd made a special accommodation for a man with no N.E.W.T.s Pansy sent one back.

He watched her write it.

She kept shoving her hair back behind one ear and he thought how much he loved that absent-minded gesture.


	51. Stay Out (Regulus-Hermione)

"I told you to stay out of my room."

Hermione almost collapsed when she heard the petulant voice. It sounded so much like a young Sirius. That was impossible though; Sirius had died, gone through the veil, and left Harry horribly adrift. They were all adrift now, of course. The three of them - her, Harry, and Ron - all trapped in this filthy townhouse as they tried to make sense of the clues Dumbledore had left them. Kreacher cooked, and fussed, but good meals didn't keep them from feeling stuck. She'd taken to poking through empty rooms because she had to be doing something. She couldn't just sit and read and reread the fairy tale book she'd been left.

She didn't think she'd find the answer to how to get the locket from Umbridge, much less how to find the rest of the horcruxes, from _The Tale of the Three Brothers_.

"I said get out. No trespassing."

A pile of laundry on the bed sat up and resolved into a boy. Dark hair sat atop pale skin and almost black eyes. His face looked blotchy, as if he'd been crying. Those eyes were rimmed with red. "Who are you?" he asked in the poshest accent she'd ever heard. He made the Queen sound like mere received pronunciation. He might have been from a different century.

Hermione smoothed her jumper almost unconsciously at his stare. She knew none of them looked their best. She'd packed quite a bit, but you could only wear the same things so many times in a row before it felt horrid no matter how clean it was. "I'm Hermione Granger," she said, determined to press onwards. "Who are you?"

"How did you get in here?" they both asked at the same time, then looked at one another.

"This is my house," he said. "This is _my_ room. You're the one who needs to explain things."

"Regulus," she breathed out. He was dead. He was gone. He was sitting in front of her looking annoyed that she'd had the temerity to come into his room.

He was bloody good looking.

She sank down onto a wooden chair, ignoring the wadded Quidditch banner sitting on it, and tried to think. This wasn't possible, but neither were so many things. Regulus Black was in his room. Was she in his time? Was he in hers? Could they use him in the horcrux hunt? Would he kiss her? He'd been a blood purist, hadn't he? Probably not, then.

Maybe she should kill him. He was a Death Eater, after all. She tried to look at his arm as surreptitiously as she could but she'd never been good at being subtle and he shoved his sleeve up. "Take a look, then," he said. "You can go tell Mum I did it just like she told me I ought."

"I'm not here from your mother," Hermione said. She was at a total loss. His mother was dead. _He_ was dead. She took a deep breath. "Did you really want to be a Death Eater."

The look on his face answered that. He wasn't going to start crying in front of her, but keeping himself calm was almost breaking him.

"Want to help us kill him?" she asked.

Oh, the spark of hope in his eyes. It was wary. He didn't trust her at all. But he was desperate enough to grab on to even the tiniest branch that might save him from drowning.

She put one foot back across the threshold of the door into what she hoped was her time, and reached a hand out to him. He took it without hesitation and she pulled his across. He hadn't been in the present for more than moment before she heard the gargled shriek of a house elf truly happy for the first time in years.

She managed to get out of the way just in time to see Kreacher fling himself at Regulus Black's knees. "You found him," the elf said, or she thought he said through all his sobbing. "Master is back. Miss Hermione found him!"

She wondered how she was going to explain this to Ron. And Harry. But mostly Ron. She decided she didn't want to think too hard about why she was so sure it would be harder to talk to Ron about this and just led Regulus Black through what remained of his house down to the kitchen. They had a lot to talk about.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N Thank you to_** _ **alasseablack on tumblr for the prompt.**_


	52. The Side Picks You (Draco-Blaise)

Draco tried not to rub at the Mark. It would catch at his peripheral vision and he'd think it was dirt, a stain, some kind of filth. Then he'd look at it and remember that it was honor. It was glory. It was _being chosen._

It was a bloody trap and he was caught in it.

He'd always preferred long sleeves, but now he wore them all the time, even to bed. Even with Blaise. He didn't want to talk about it. Didn't want to think about it. He'd just do what he was told, just kill the most powerful wizard in history before he'd even passed his N.E.W.T.s and his family would be fine and everything would go back to the way it had been before. That's what he told himself as he did his homework and wrote his essays and felt his feet dragging him, almost against his will, out to the Quidditch pitch.

He didn't walk out onto it. He just stood, at the edge of the stands, and set one hand against the wooden support that went up, up, up into the seats. He'd resigned from the team. He'd told them, most arrogant Malfoy voice he could summon, that he had _better things to do._

He missed it so much he wanted to cry.

"I knew I'd find you here."

Draco didn't turn around. Blaise had his ways and their relationship had never been an easy one. Pansy would fawn, and Greg was a sycophant, but Blaise held himself aloof. He'd loved that at first. Getting the most arrogant of their house to shudder apart at his touch had been a triumph.

"You regret quitting yet?"

"I have a task," Draco said. He knew he sounded like a prat. He knew he sounded horrible. He wanted to turn and beg Blaise to love him, to hold on to him, to not let him go. _Tell me I'm not a monster_ , he wanted to say. Instead he added, " _He_ trusts me."

" _He_ is using you," Blaise said. He turned the 'he' into a sneer, into condemnation.

"And I should run to Dumbledore?" Draco asked bitterly. They all knew how Dumbledore worked. He'd protect the people useful to him and no one else. Draco was pawn for the other king. You captured pawns. You didn't hide them away. You didn't save them.

No one was going to save him.

"It would be better than what you're doing," Blaise said.

"At least it's better than what you're doing," Draco said. When in doubt, go on the offensive. Better to attack than to be attacked. "Staying neutral?" He turned that into a sneer of his own. "You think that's going to work? You'll eventually have to pick a side."

"I think the side picked you," Blaise said. He started to reach a hand out as if he were going to set it on Draco's arm and Draco closed his eyes and waited for that touch. He _prayed_ for that touch. If Blaise showed him even the slightest care, he'd crumble. He'd sob and ask for help. He'd do anything, risk anything, to make it out of this. The touch didn't come, and when he risked a look, Blaise had his arms crossed, any hint of vulnerability gone.

"But then, you're honored to be chosen, aren't you?" Blaise asked. "It's all you've ever wanted, being the Chosen One."

"It's not," Draco started to say. _It's not like that_ , he wanted to say, but it was too late. Blaise had turned, his back straight and proud as he left Draco huddled against the stands.

. . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N – Thank you to ff-sunset-oasis for the prompt on tumblr: "You'll eventually have to pick a side." Blaise/any pairing of your choice (or no pairing)_**


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